Transliteracy and academia
My occasional correspondent Sue Thomas is interviewed in this Times Higher Education Supplement article, Grappling with the Digital Divide: students are increasingly ‘transliterate’, communicating across a range of technologies. Can academics keep up?
Academics at De Montfort University are researching the nature and impact of a new kind of literacy: the sharp end of modern communication known as “transliteracy”. The term describes the ability to read, write and interact on a range of platforms. Think of the media’s teenage stereotype, a young girl watching Hollyoaks on television while simultaneously discussing its plotlines on the social networking site Facebook, listening to music on MySpace and texting her friend to discuss home study.
The term “transliteracy” was coined by Alan Liu, a professor in the English department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, whose research on the subject is being carried out across University of California campuses. The project will establish working groups from across academic disciplines to study online reading and shared technology.
At De Montfort, Sue Thomas, a professor of new media, is more interested in the impact that transliteracy is having on higher education and pedagogy. In these terms, many academics are in essence illiterate, says Thomas. Most would admit it, even taking a certain pride in their part-removal from the world of e-communication. This matters if they find their teaching relationship with hyper-transliterate students breaking down because of an inability to communicate fully with one another.
Thomas believes that if academics cannot show themselves to be transliterate, they will lose the respect of their students. “University is about sharing knowledge,” she says, and students expect it to be carried out on their terms, in the ways they are used to. “There is still a huge cultural barrier for some people. We find quite often that librarians and e-learning staff are very open to this, but when you go within the humanities and you look at traditional areas such as English, there is a real resistance to technology.”
Both alarming and encouraging, read the rest of this article here.
One of Sue’s other research strands is the use of natural metaphors in cyberspace, a theme she’s developing in a new blog, The Wild Surmise. I’ve mentioned her work in previous posts, most recently here and at Complex Terrain Lab and I’m really looking forward to her forthcoming book on the subject.
Update 29 Aug 2008: David Betz at Kings of War has some comments on this from a lecturer’s perspective.
It is a common refrain in academia that the students understand the technologies that are emerging much better than the academics. I feel that as a criticism that is horribly misguided as as an English professor or history professor should be an expert in their field not technology. There is another problem with the example from the article of multi-tasking and equating that to transliteracy. Stacking multiple tasks onto the learning task just does not work. The breadth and depth of the science looking at this makes a compelling case that students who multi-task just aren’t as smart (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/07/060726083302.htm).
As to the transliteracy problem it is also a cultural/generational/maturity problem. Students make an investment in their education, and professors make an investment in their career. Students enter college woefully unprepared in most of the western world and in America egregiously so… Yet time and time again the expectation is that behavior, communication, and models of learning are thrown back at academia as they are not meeting the students needs. There are times where the student needs to meet the academia model too.
I would not ask my brother in-laws advice on surgery because he took organic chemistry in lieu of a doctor anymore than I would ask my students to inform me of what technology literacy means. Unfortunately technology is sexy, and people muddle through trying to inform society without considering the ramifications of their musings. Personally I am way far out beyond the edges of the bleeding edge of technology and examining the effects before they confront my students. Rather than grasping new technologies like talismans to ward off poor teaching or mainline grant applications.
There is a lot to be said for sitting on chunk of grassy dirt and asking your students to talk, interact, and communicate personally. After all we must learn to talk before we blog.
Hi Sam,
Each to their own, I say. I wouldn’t force my grandmother to use the internet when she’s happy to use the phone instead. I think the gist of the article is that if education is somehow being compromised by a lack of technological literacy on the part of teachers then there should perhaps be some drive towards cracking that particular nut. After all, students will increasingly be ‘digital natives’ whose natural (a loaded word, I realise) inclination is towards the use of technology-mediated communication under some circumstances.
Is not an English professor ‘in-the-world’ as much as their students? They do not need to be an expert in technology any more than I do in order to use it. If they choose not to utilise technology then so be it, but I doubt that situation will be allowed to persist for long. In time, those students will be professors themselves and this debate may be null and void.
You’re right about wrongly equating multi-tasking and transliteracy, they’re two different things. I may be able to use a cellphone, the internet and read a book but you won’t catch me trying to do all three at once if I actually want to get some real work done!
There are times where the student needs to meet the academia model too.
Absolutely. I think we know why this seems not to be the case in the real world. Pandering to the lowest common denominator is never a successful formula for progress. Here in the UK we have the extraordinary situation that 25.9% of recent A-level (high school final) results were at the top A grade. What happened to the Bell curve? The situation is so ridiculous that there is serious talk of adding an A* grade to differentiate between all the A grades. Pair this with the ongoing public debate over how-our-kids-are-actually-getting-more-stupid and there appears to be a problem. Reintroduce the Bell curve; in the context of your original comments, forcing kids to concentrate and think might be a way forward, rather than teaching all classes in Second Life.
I hanker for that chunk of grassy dirt sometimes…
Tim, take a look at Tony Waters’ post at Ethnography.com on whinging about practitioners… it touches on some similar themes, possibly offers a counterpoint to this discussion:
Whining About Practitioners
Thought-provoking article, if a little idealistic. I think your comment at the end of his post about sums it up: great in theory, almost certainly not applicable in practice. Also, you note that academics do have a duty to make their research accessible (another ideal, perhaps?). The best academic communicators do, of course, do this, the first example that comes to mind being Richard Feynman, but there are plenty of others. Feynman’s audiences were either academic or public, as I understand it, rather than politicians or policy-makers, who represent that tricky target group with which Tony Waters takes issue.
As a client-contractor relationship usually exists in the situations to which Waters refers, surely it behoves the contractor-academic to present accessible findings. I agree though that those who commission the research should be better equipped to parse research results but that’s unlikely to happen, particularly as information environments continue to quicken. Exceptions to this tend to get a more favourable reception from the academic community. I’m thinking the Rumsfeld-Gates transition, for example.