Tag Archives: network literacy

Symposium 05: Network Literacy and Hypertext

Leftover Symposium 04 questions:

  1. Should network literacy be focused on in earlier education?

    • Can it be taught formally? 
      • Yes absolutely, and it should be. Some parts of it are already in practice, but not enough. Arduino is a service which is being used in school to teach children about how to make computers that can sense and control more of the physical world than the average desktop computer.
      • To some extent, you graduate from school being quite disempowered from networks because things have consistently been gatekept for you.
    • What do you think the solution is? Should we let kids teach themselves through doing?
      • Adrian believes the only way you ever learn anything is through doing, and I agree with him. I have, and always will be, a kinaesthetic learner.
      • Kids teach themselves how to do things. The issue is facilitating this in a way that they learn the how and why of things instead of the didactic ‘do this’ and ‘do that’.
      • School systems often take out the ability to think critically, as the architecture of school education is all tailored towards passing exams and getting good scores on essays and projects. You get trained to think that bell curves are natural order, but really they’re an educational ideology/construction. It’s been shown that information retention rates drop off exponentially after this type of learning, so it’s not necessarily a valuable method.

“We unlearn how to ask good questions. Problem with that in an age of distributed expertise, is that if you can’t ask good questions, you can’t find good answers. That’s the world we’re going into. Things are not black and white, it’s very grey and the skills you need to navigate this world are different.” – Adrian Miles

Symposium 05 questions:

  1. How is hypertext relevant to us as media practitioners?

    • Adrian says, how is it not? We deal with structures like that on almost all of our internet usage – such as YouTube (clicking from one video to another), Buzzfeed, news websites, Twitter, etc.
    • Elliott tells us of dual screening mentality which is a rising concern in the media industries, which says: ‘okay, we get your idea, but what’s the second screen going to be showing?’ As in, how are you going to utilise the network affordances by doing more? i.e. online webisodes, podcasts, building communities online, etc. Heritage media are doing this, but only slowly. They use it to shore up their existing model, as opposed to drastically changing it. They think ‘more is better’.
    • There’s a big gap, an opening to step in and properly use non-linear structures in storytelling. Adrian thinks that this is a waste that this isn’t working yet.
    • When moving into digital, content became highly granular (small chunks), and it becomes about the relationship between each other. Temporary relationships. This is how things get meaning, with the infinite multiple relationships between the parts. How we make stuff then had to change, because the end now doesn’t matter. And now the reader/audience power dynamic changes as well. Hypertext realised this.

  2. What predictions about network literacy should we be aware of?

    • Those who are network literate will engage with technology and come out on top better.
    • Media industries are changing drastically. However, history is not linear so we don’t know what’s going to happen, it’s a series of accidents.
    • Things to be aware of:
      • Physicality of the network – servers, infrastructure
      • Legal battles which may restrict or create affordances
      • Political battles, legislation, copyright.

  3. What are the consequences of being network illiterate?

    • You will have a reduced capacity to engage or develop appropriate strategies to engage.
    • Your only ability to understand will be through someone else – you will be dependent on them telling you what it means.  Think about what could this mean for creativity; corruption?

Symposium 04

Adrian was shocked in this week’s symposium to discover how little it seemed our cohort knew about the validity of certain internet content. I think, perhaps, that this was a stretch too far as I would hazard a guess that most of what we subsequently heard about looking for cues for legitimacy, such as locating which type of domain it’s coming from, was not new information for many in the lecture theatre. Where I thought the discussion turned very interesting though was when talking about how and why these practices are emulated, undermined, and impersonated (such as by The Onion, an American parody news site).

I think a similar area which is equally interesting is the rise of Twitter accounts which impersonate various organisations or people. Such as Vice Is Hip, Fake Pinterest, or even this article showing what might happen if Disney Princesses had Instagram.

However, I think these types of humour rely heavily on a more widely understood humour of parody, as opposed to impersonation.

We then listened to discussions about network literacy and its relation to print literacy, including what limitations and affordances both have. Adrian explained that we have a tendency to confuse form and content, which I wholeheartedly agree with. It was also interesting to hear Adrian say that the spaces within which network literacy happen have to be performed. They do not preexist us, we actually have to actively do them.

Adrian also reminded us that literacies, which exist in hundreds of forms, are always enacted in very minor detail. His example of ordering a lemonade in America illustrated this well. He explains that the varying social etiquettes of literacies complement and contest each other. They are not clearly defined, but entangled and messy, interacting and embedding themselves in our social practices.

We were reminded that we constantly rely on third parties to do things for us, leaving us disempowered due to our constant reliance on expertise. For example, we may know about books and how to write one, but we don’t necessarily know how a printer works. Similarly, we know how to curate our online presences with content, but we might not know how to build a web page. This is the sort of network literacy that needs to be ramped up in order to participate fully as effective media practitioners in our changing media landscape.

Readings 03: Network Literacy, Loop Learning and Essays

Reading 03.1

Adrian Miles’ reading was useful to help me think about the following things:

Becoming a peer: The blogging world, and indeed the world of networks, is all about successfully participating as a peer. Sharing, linking, and commenting on other users’ content ensures that you are being an effective user and producer – or a ‘produser’ as Axel Bruns has described.

“To be ‘good’ at network literacies is to contribute as much as it is to consume.” – Adrian Miles

Print literacy vs network literacy: Print literacy is reinforced over many years of traditional education, with emphasis being placed on books, reading, writing and essay-writing being “the major forms for the expression of knowledge in the humanities”. However, with the rise of ICTs, knowledge is now being formed, shared and disseminated in drastically new forms, and we need to strengthen our network literacy skills and reinforce them in the same way that print literacy has embedded itself in our culture of learning.

RSS, tags, and folksonomies: These are all network tools which allow content to communicate between themselves and gather in locations other than where they were originally published. This allows for easier, faster and more efficient information flows between users, and it also allows the individual appropriation of content for different purposes.

Reading 03.2

I didn’t get around to reading all of Mark Smith’s article about Chris Argyris. From the brief scan I did, it seems to be about single-loop and double-loop learning, and I’m interested in learning what that means so I must remember to finish this reading next week.

Reading 03.3

In Paul Graham’s The Age of the Essay he gives a run down of the history of ‘the essay’, particularly how it’s used in education and how we inherited our traditional form of it. However he then goes on to explain to “give the other side of the story” about how essays can achieve different things if we write them well.

Essayer is the French verb meaning “to try” and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.”

Graham claims that “due to a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature”, meaning that essay writing has been devalued into something that is perceived as boring and pointless (to the masses). However, I found this idea problematic as I have always been one of the 0.00001% who loved my English studies in high-school, and essay writing in this style was always a favourite activity of mine. I am definitely familiar with the groans and mumbles about essay writing that came from my peers though, I just personally always thought that essay writing was a really beneficial activity that taught me some great skills such as critical thinking and the importance of good editing.

Graham advocates that essay writing should be about working something else, and that we should write them for ourselves to help this process occur, instead of writing them to prove a point or be convincing. He says that essays are about surprises, and “surprises are things that you not only didn’t know, but that contradict things you thought you knew.”

Where I did find myself fundamentally agreeing with Graham was in his insistence for encouraging people to ask questions. I’ve always been inquisitive, and used to thoroughly tire my parents out with question upon question when I was younger, and I believe that a questioning disposition can get you a long way.

Reading 01: Adrian Miles – ‘Blogs in Media Education: A Beginning’

In the first week’s reading, Adrian Miles discusses the crucial importance for media students (and teachers) to use blogs so that they are practicing within the network in order to strengthen their network literacy.

[Blogs are] exemplars of an interlinked, networked, fluid and distinctly contemporary writing practice and communicative space, and it is these qualities that can be leveraged to make them effective learning environments.”

Continue Reading…

Learning to live in the Age of Networks

Network literacy: Perhaps it’s not as hard as we might think it is.

Like this article by Norton suggests, maybe it’s just about learning a new perspective. Just like putting on a new pair of glasses through which to look at the world.

“It’s like learning a new city, invisible but beautiful, and baffling when you don’t know how a new city works. But then, as you roam around, it can start to make sense. You get more comfortable, and in time, your rhythms come together with its, and you can feel the city.”

Ranging from the screens we look at each day, to the fibre optics that run beneath out feet; from the electrical powerpoint we plug into day in day out, to the toilets we flush – we live with and in networks.

Networks are an incestuous bunch – they overlap and entangle with each other is a beautiful, messy way.

Like Norton’s article, I’m going to try and imagine that my computer has senses. As a machine, it receives all of the information from the network and processes it for me, delivering me a neat set of translated actions that make sense. I click on my notification that tells me I have a new instant message, my computer then does it’s thing and opens the text so that I can read what someone has said to me. Similarly, I perform Google searches, I edit blog posts, and adjust the privacy settings on my Facebook, and my computer enables me to do all this easily and effectively.

However, this does not equate to network literacy.

I need to learn how to understand the magical dance of what happens in-between the clicks. 

So, in order to develop my knowledge, here’s a checklist of a few things I’ve always found mysterious, which I hope to learn by the end of the semester in Networked Media.

  • Learn what an IP address is, what it does and why
  • Cookies and cache (although I’d much prefer to learn about cookies and cake)
  • Understand what a server is and what it does
  • Attempt to demystify ‘packet sharing’, code, cryptography, SSL and encryption.
  • Explore what possibilities the network can afford for me as a media professional

(Image via flickr)