Beginning this week and continuing for the next couple, I’ve been participating in a colleague’s class whose students are discussing one of those terms that has become so popular and widely used (or overused in the eyes of some) that it’s come to mean all different kinds of things for all different kinds of people. And what is this slippery term? New Media. In this class, we’re discussing it in the context of Jeff Rice’s The Rhetoric of Cool.
Not surprisingly, it’s raised the question of what exactly do we mean by the term literacy. By coincidence, while catching up on a recent batch of RSS feeds, I happened to come across Doug Belshaw’s post in which, just a couple of weeks ago, he created a discussion forum dedicated to this very topic. One of the threads is labeled Hannon on literacy and after reading through the various posts, I noticed two dominant concerns: annotatability and findability.
In educational environments, teachers encourage students to annotate texts because it promotes better comprehension, which ideally leads to more informed, critical analysis. Similarly, when students write about these texts, it can be a real bear sometimes when they butt up against that all-too-common hurdle: finding that particularly poignant quote or passage that they remember reading, but just can’t seem to find. One of the posters in Belshaw’s forum connects it to a recent class session-
Last Thursday I had a Y11 English class finishing coursework on ‘Of Mice and Men.’ One of the students remembered the gist of a quotation he wanted to use. He’d been flicking through the book for ages looking for it before he asked me. I brought all my skills of memory recall, scanning and skimming to bear. And couldn’t find it. Suddenly the solution dawned on me: I found a copy of the text on Google books; a quick keyword search and a few seconds later we had the exact quotation he needed.
Learning doesn’t happen through a tedious cycle of flicking pages for ages. Digital texts ease the search burden. Just press CTRL-F.
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