New literacies

Several weeks ago, our country found itself yet again on the brink of an international dispute when a young speechwriter got ahead of herself and published nonsensical thoughts about Vietnamese wine, motorbikes, and men. Enough has been said about her or the issue and I sincerely hope she has moved on from her traumatic experience although that would be virtually impossible as her unfortunate tweets have already gone viral and are forever etched in the digital space of the World Wide Web.

 About the same time, a former student of our school typed himself in a similar situation when he cursed to the highest heavens his alma mater for not permitting him and the rest of his batch to join the school’s annual disco. Soon enough, teachers flooded his wall with criticism of being disrespectful and ungrateful. Ironically, the student, just like our cum laude presidential speechwriter, was not really known to be so crude. In fact, he is one of the nicest kids in school; he was mostly quiet and often kept to himself.

 Still, ironically, these and other young individuals, because of their actions, would soon be accused of being “uneducated.” And uneducated they are, but not in the pejorative sense of the word. The lack of education here simply reflects the truth that our young generation did not learn enough skills and competencies from our lagging system of education.

 We are talking about the new literacies. The school is not what it used to be as it has been invaded, like everything else, by technology. To master reading, writing, listening, and speaking is no longer sufficient as indicators of being literate. Learning is no longer the monopoly of the school. It has expanded not just to computers, but to Ipods and Ipads, and the googol of websites found in the thinnest and tiniest of contraptions.

 This is the world of the our students and though at first, it may seem as something that children could easily master, incidents like what happened to Mai Mislang and our student clearly point to a grave danger of underestimating technology. In his blog, Barry Joseph of newmedialiteracies.org, asks teachers and parents essential questions about technology: “How do our children learn to synthesize what they learn? How many of them feel they are in charge of their networks or are even aware they exist as an interconnected whole? What do the youth need to understand and strategically navigate their distributed learning networks?”

 The author and his organization were able to enumerate 12 digital literacies that each student should master before being called literate in the 21st century.

 Fortunately, many progressive and well-funded schools have already taken on the challenge of educating their students with new literacies. The most basic literacy that a school should teach is that of “judgment.” New Media Literacies defines this as “the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources.” Indeed, from my experience, when one asks a public school student to do research using the Internet, the poor child would not be able to distinguish the extent of the validity of the information they got from philstar.com versus a website like urbandictionary.com. More importantly, the value of judgment will help them reflect on what they should type and publish before the entire world. Without the school teaching judgment, where does a student learn to reconcile the disappearing boundaries of private opinions and public tweets and posts? 

Teaching students the value of judgment when using the web is in itself overwhelming enough, but some schools have gone beyond these and require their students to come up with wiki pages to interact and pool knowledge with others, a literacy the organization calls “collective intelligence.” Other schools go beyond these and encourage their students to engage in projects that would be promoted through the literacy of “networking.” Still, others enhance their lessons by engaging students with the literacies of “problem solving” and “play” through online games and simulation. Teachers who could expose their students to these new modalities of learning are indeed laudable, but they still have to grapple with distributed cognition, visualization, negotiation, performance, transmedia navigation, appropriation, and multitasking before they could be certified as 21st century teachers. That’s just for now. Who knows how many more literacies one needs in order to confront the exponential challenge of the modern world?

Technology has overtaken many vital institutions of our society, be it the government, the law, the Church, and even the home. For man to catch up and make sense of the modern upheavals of today’s digital world, one thing is imperative — education must not be left behind.