‘Literacy’ may not mean what you think it does.
In evaluating a person’s literacy, the measure could be: can you read and comprehend at an appropriate level of difficulty? Or, it could be: are you tech-literate? Net-literate? Blog-literate? And now, for me, are you podcast-literate?
I have recently become a pod-caster. It’s kind of embarrasing because I know that I don’t have anything so important to say that people should listen to me talk about it online or on an i-pod while they’re working out.
But for those of us in ENED 2920 (Adolescent Literature) with Kevin Leander and Jim Furman, experimenting with a new or unconventional form of literacy is a requirement. So I chose a podcast.
Think about all the images (visual and auditory) you encounter between the time you open your eyes in the morning and then close them at night — or better, between waking up in the morning and walking out the front door. We constantly take in information and “read” it — whether it’s the look on someone’s face, the tone of a human voice, the layout of a myspace page, or a podcast. The question is, where do we learn to do that kind of reading and interpreting efffectively? If the answer is “in the classroom,” then are we doing a good job as teachers to equip students with these skills? If not, how can we improve?
That’s one of the issues we’re discussing with Dr. Leander (and it’s the reason for my sheepish podcasting) but it’s also the focus of the Mid-winter Conference of the National Council of Teachers of English held this year at Peabody, February 23-25. The conference will focus on issues of new and nonstandard literacies: specifically the “living literacies of the body and image.”
It’s pretty amazing that I was able to create a personal podcast just by signing up with Gcast and that I can record my voice on the Internet by making a call on my cell phone. But in a world where anyone can publish audio, photos, video, information, and a “wealth” of other ideas on the Web, how do we teach students to become discerning readers of these new and emerging texts?
And why might it be increasingly important that we do so?
– Rachel B
The real challenge is to determine how to use these technologies to further education. How could a classroom teacher use podcasts? Lectures? Reminders of homework? Reminders for projects?
You write about stuff that is so important here — where is everybody else on this topic?