Literacy 2.0

Dr. Jason Ohler is a speaker, writer, teacher, researcher, and lifelong digital humanist. He has spent over two decades leading educators, students, and parents in the effective, creative, and wise use of technology. He is first and foremost a storyteller, telling tales of the future that are grounded in the past. He is author of Digital Stories in the Classroom: A Telling Experience and Digital Community, Digital Citizen. His next book explores what Leonardo da Vinci can tell us about the digital age.

For more information visit his website at: www.jasonohler.com.

In your article “Art Becomes the Fourth R”, you claim that “art is fast becoming the new literacy for our times.” Can you explain what you mean by that?

I am not referring to the arts in education, but to art as a foundational literacy. In the past we have “sold” art in terms of expressing yourself and getting in touch with yourself, but to be literate in this day and age, you have to be creative and be an artist on some level. We are living in a very dynamic, a very literate, and a very aesthetic age, and you ignore this at your own peril in terms of your potential for financial success.

You can’t be successful on the Web lacking the skills of an artist or a designer. In today’s world, if you lack these skills, you hire someone or you look foolish. It is time for art to step up and say, “we are not a content area, we are about more than self-expression, we are about jobs!”

What does this new literacy look like?

When I went to school and a teacher mentioned homework, I could automatically assume they meant writing. But the new baseline literacy going forward is what I call the media collage. The media collage brings together art, design, visuals and all of the other things you can add to a web page. Rather than being just a collection of multiple forms of media, the term media collage implies that you are going to put them together thoughtfully in a way that works and makes sense to the viewer.

If we take the media collage and combine it with world of Web 2.0 and social and participatory media, you must be literate in production and how you express yourself. We have gone from a world of mass media, in which a very few people create for many, to a era in which you can easily master simple video creation tools and begin producing movies for your own TV channel on YouTube. Literally every stage of media development is free and ubiquitous. Your success depends not on money or ability to use the tools, but what you are able to produce and share with them.

How does this affect the learning environment?

Teachers now have much fuller palettes [of methodologies and pedagogies] from which to choose. It used to be that kids had very few options for making media… basically crayons on paper. Now we can say to students, “You need to prove to me you understand the concept of gravity.” Then, we can have a dialogue about the best medium to use to do that.

As a teacher of these tools, I need to be concerned with how I help shape this new media narrative. We have always wanted kids to express themselves, but we need to enable them to produce a new narrative using new kinds of tools. This is not just a question of how to use a software title well, but now that we can speak in pictures, we need to ask, “what is the grammar of a movie?”

How can we implement this type of learning in today’s high-stakes classroom?

The reality is that we test for a traditional kind of literacy, but we hope and pray that once our kids graduate they are literate in the new media narrative. We all know that if they are not, their chances of being useful in the work world are greatly diminished.

That being said, traditional writing is more important than it has ever been before, because good media is preceded by good research and good writing. When students do a lot of writing and planning before they turn the computer on, their work has more substance.

When students come together in a team to produce a project, they engage in all sorts of traditional forms of literacy, like talking to each other, sharing notes and emails, and organizing task assignments. But from there, they go off and create videos, wikis, and other forms of media collage. What has emerged is that literacy is no longer an individual private pursuit. It begins there, but becomes a social pursuit because it is almost impossible to be useful as an island unto yourself.