Prof Alan Liu, Distinguished Seminar, 2pm, 4th July 2007, IOCT, De Montfort University (PART) How Can We Improve Online Reading? -- The University of California Transliteracies Project Browse, jump, search, filter, aggregate, bookmark, annotate -- these signature reading practices of the Internet are both our history and future. History, because recent research in the history of the book, history of reading, and cognitive science fields shows that "extensive" reading across an amplitude of texts (contrasted with intensive, holy, or close reading) have had a long evolution. They were complaining about information overload as early as the 17th-century. Future, because even amid the flood of multimedia, text is extending in new ways. Much of so-called "Web 2.0" is text-centric: e.g., blogs, wikis, social networking, folksonomical tagging (not to mention ever-present email).
Alan Liu is Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford Univ. Isb21 - home. Comprehensive Literacy Components. Visual Literacy and Visual Thinking « WebTools For Learners. What is visual literacy and is it different from visual thinking? I’ve been pondering that for a while now. I have absolutely no training in art or any form of visual literacy. I assume, I hope with some degree of accuracy, that visual literacy means, in parallel with textual literacy, knowing the history and current usage of images and colours so you can interpret them within a community of knowledgeable users. As I said, I’ve never studied art or visual stuff, but Jay Cross says 80% of learning is informal – and that’s where I’ve learned anything I know, visually. Jay Cross on Informal Learning My informal learning sources have been So I’m a autodidact in visual content, kind of in the position of “I don’t know art, but I know what I like.”
And what I like is simplicity and contrast. Early Yahoo & Google For me, there was no problem choosing – I went to the visual simplicity of Google. Dave Tosh's PLE However! Over my adulthood, the culture has become much more visual. Joan Vinall-Cox's PLE. Weblogg-ed Presentation Links / Wikis. The pedagogy of social tools « Let´s wait and see … Christopher D. Sessums posted an essay in his weblog about the skills for 21st Century Learners: Preparing ourselves for participatory culture, taken from the Project New Literacy Media.
The later includes a historical evolution from oral culture to print culture, mass media to an emergent participatory culture. They consider there are three preliminary types of skills and around twelve emergent ones that need to be addressed. Among the basic are the ability to read and write, the ability to operate core technologies and tools desired for specific projects, and the ability to process information across multiple systems of representation. Among the emerging skills they mention: play, navigation, resourcefulness, networking, negotiation and discernment, among others. So obviously, these needed skills cannot be learned, practiced and mastered in a traditional learning environment but in an open participatory one as achieved by the Flat World Project. Like this: Like Loading... 21st Century Literacies: Tools for Reading the World.
eSchool News online - Report: Students struggle with information literacy.