The Multiple Literacy Model

This model was the product of a discussion we had one day in TE991, when Dr. Hartman asked us to try to sum up what we had gleaned thus far from the class. I thought about how there seemed to be a confluence of sensory experience as it relates to textual, visual and spoken communication, positioned within a contextual framework of cultural, social and historical practices. Underlying all of this is the presence of technology, which appears to makes the process of learning and making meaning from text more efficient and expedient.

While this model tries to account for most modes of communication and implies global inclusion of all demographic and ethnic groups, there are exceptions by lack of representation, either by socio-economic or distribution factors. These dividing factors exist sporadically yet persistently, and cannot even be remedied by imposing a comprehensive model of multiple literacies. Still, it is hoped that by suggesting a model, that a paradigmatic change can be addressed and sought after as the norm, rather than the ideal.

Awaiting the decision ...

This week, as I am await the decision from Dr. D'Agustino and feverishly prepare for the end of the semester, I am experiencing a sense of disconnectedness, as if I am merely observing the activity on screen. I think it may be a long learned mechanism, a kind of survival strategy, to not become too involved emotionally with the process of completing the semester, or awaiting any decision over which I have absolutely no control. I have been rejected dozens of times, so many that it has become an absolute surprise and delight if I am ever chosen for some activity, like the study tour in China, or the Summer Research Fellowship. As to the end of the semester, it will come, and whether I have completed the required projects, or not, matters less in the final outcome. Of course, not finishing is hardly an option, and it seems that I am always looking ahead three months or more, planning the sequence of events from now until defense, where approximately they must take place, and what must be done between now and then. So the stress, which should be quite high at the moment, has actually become somewhat normalized within the typical daily levels of cortisol. I only actually feel the stress when it becomes, for other, normal people, unbearable.

AERA, New Literacies and Gaming

Last week, San Diego was the destination for international scholars in education, where the learned elite gathered for AERA's annual conference. Having never attended an AERA conference before, I had only an inkling of what to expect from other graduate students, mostly that it was a over-hyped and overbooked spectacle at its worst, and a Las Vegas-style showcase for soon-to-be and newly-minted PhDs at its best. What I actually experienced was somewhere in between, a rarefied occasion for the rising stars of the academic world to commingle with already established supernovas of the world's colleges and universities, to learn, be inspired and possibly experience a paradigm shift in thinking. Well-attended, yes. But no more a spectacle than some of the K-12 tech ed conferences I have attended. In fact, the quality of the presentations far exceeded anything I had seen before. But that was probably to be expected. After all, this is the finest of the educational research community, flexing their collective intellectual and theoretical muscle. It was an exciting place to be. Some of the highlights included ...

• Meeting Chris Dede of Harvard University. I found him to be a charming, erudite person, who nailed the essence of the session (Teaching with Virtual Worlds and Multi-User Games) he presided over as discussant with an uncanny accuracy and perception of the issues inherent in the topic. Later, I talked at length with his doctoral student who was presenting a poster session on pedagogical agents in K-12 science classrooms in the main pavilion.
• Discussing creativity with the very few creativity researchers at the conference. When I glanced at the program, I became enthused to see Dr. Ai-Girl Tan to be presenting at a roundtable in one of the sessions. I hurried over to the Marriot Hall and found her table, only to discover that she was a no-show. I was disappointed, as were several other Dr. Tan groupies who had flocked to her table. However, later I happened to attend another rountable session where I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Eunsook Hong who is co-authoring a paper with Roberta Milgram at Tel-Aviv University, and also met a young doctoral student named Karen Rambo who conducted a project where she correlated 16 different creativity assessments and found that Torrance Average had the highest correlation (r=.91, p<0.001)>
• Discovering that the deadline for the IGI chapter had been extended until April 20. Still I am glad that I was able to get it in on the 5th.
• Discussing instant messaging as a new literacy with Sarah Mayer, Richard Mayer's daughter. It was interesting to see that the results of her study showed an increased usage of informal writing (e.g. abbreviations) in the texts produced by high school students, contrary to what Gloria Jacobs (2008) found in her research. Jacobs found that college students, in a reversal of what we commonly would expect, were far more unlikely to use abbreviations in their IM correspondences perhaps a result of the expectations of college level writing in general. I told Sarah about the Jacobs research, and she was quite interested since it conflicted with her findings.

Since the conference, I have had contact with both Dr. Milgram and Dr. Hong, both of whom sent me several recent published and in-press articles of their research. I am somewhat amazed that Dr. Milgram took time out her day to answer my email, and send me some current papers as well. Her encouraging words lead me to believe that I am in the right area of research, and that my questions concerning creativity and effective teaching are spot-on. I hope that someday I can provide some mentorship to an up and coming researcher, one who will carry the torch and further the work that her predessecors accomplished.

Proposed!

Last Sunday, I submitted the chapter proposal entitled: Multiliteracy and Technology: A Mandate for K-12 Education to Dr. Stephen D'Agustino at Fordham University in New York. I don't entertain high hopes that it will be accepted, particularly since I am quite the "emerging" scholar and haven't had a chance to really develop a track record of publications. My professor's name will, of course, be on the manuscript, to lend more credibility to the offering. I also think that the proposal has merit, and it would be a very interesting read, particularly for those involved with school reform and looking to technology in ways that will increase student engagement and boost literacy scores. Will it contribute to this goal? Well, I cannot claim that reading my chapter will do anything to help teachers raise their student's reading and writing scores on standardized tests. I'm really only hoping that it will but plant a seed of thought, which given time to germinate could nurture a new model of literacy instruction in a handful of schools. I might even volunteer to write an editorial in eSchoolNews on this topic, and publish the model there. But, at the very least, it does satisfy a course requirement and having this off my desk allows me to focus a bit more intensely on the other things needed to be completed, like this blog. Next week, I am off to San Diego to AERA, and hopefully will have a chance to meet some of the folks whose research and theories I have been reading for the past several years, particularly some of the more prominent names in academia. It is an exciting time, I think, to be an educational technology scholar in the U.S. I am optimistic for the future, book chapter or not. And it certainly won't be the last book chapter I will write - perhaps even next time I will be invited to the melange.

Your Baby Can Read?

This morning I turned on the Travel channel as I do nearly every morning, hoping to catch a show on China, and there was an infomercial on this early reading program called "Your Baby Can Read." Naturally, I went straight to my computer and Googled it to see what else I could find, even including the tag word "controversy." Oddly, there has been very little independent research done on this program, maybe because it is so new. However, the developer, Dr. Robert Titzer, supposedly used it on his daughter who is now a junior in college, so the research and development behind the program has been going on for some time.

The videos on the website are pretty impressive and I have to admit the principles behind the program are consistent with the research on brain development in very young children, however, I wonder if these results have more to do with behaviorist principles of reinforcement (baby says word, parents smile and give praise), and whole word recognition, than really being able to read. We still haven't resolved the whole word/phonemic awareness controversy. Titzer claims that children eventually learn phonemic awareness, but he doesn't say how this happens.
I know that Emma and Morgan both could recognize whole words pretty early on, but didn't recognize phonemes until this year in kindergarten ... still, I wonder if early literacy takes place much earlier than we think, and it just isn't reinforced in pre-school. There just isn't enough independent research on programs such as these to start implementing them in Head Start and early pre-school programs.

There may be some implications for multiple literacies ... does introducing so-called "academic" content as early as 9 months stifle a child's natural curiosity and creativity? Or, is this even an issue if the learning atmosphere is fun and the parent or caregiver is sensitive to the child's interest level? This program makes use of multiple sensory stimuli, and according to Dr. Titzer, the program helps the children to make connections between the visual, auditory and verbal information, which I will admit many other baby learning programs do not (such as BrainyBaby and Baby Einstein). Many developmental psychologists caution against letting children interact with "screen time," but I think this argument is more about the content of what is being watched, than the screen time itself. TV cannot just be used as a babysitter and parents/caregivers must interact with the baby. The multiple sensory stimulus approach may help children to associate meaning to images and text at a much earlier age than we may have previously thought, and help to develop those synaptic connections faster, than just using images and sounds alone. There is considerable evidence that language is innate, and that visual literacy is as well. Could it be that reading, or the recognition of symbols, is also innate in humans?

The other questions are whether the children taught to read with this program are actually comprehending what they are reading, as in the case of the little boy reading about parallelograms and trapezoids? Do they advance faster than others in 1st and 2nd grade, when other children traditionally learn to read? Will teachers recognize these "advanced" readers and give them reading material that will enhance further brain development (e.g. reading to learn, narratives), or will they be held back by curriculum designed for very early readers? And, do they hit the "fourth-grade slump" earlier than other children, if at all? Much more research is needed, that is obvious, and not from Dr. Titzer himself.

Personal Brain

With just six days to go before the proposal is due, and battling a particularly pesky cold virus, I needed to start getting my thoughts organized to begin to write. I also knew that there were multiple angles from which to pursue this, and putting my ideas down would help with that. As I was conducting a search for some kind of book chapter outline (hopefully something generic, yet with an academic flavor) I ran across this software called TheBrain, or Personal Brain, a mindmapping software that offered a free download, so I decided to try it. Within 30 minutes, I had a rather complicated map developed, and was beginning to see multiple connections amongst the many aspects of "Becoming Multi-literate." One of the thoughts that has emerged from this exercise is that much of what we do one the Web requires proficiency in what we call basics of literacy, or reading and writing fluency, for without being able to read and write well, much of what we do on the web will not have much impact, on either our ability to learn, or to communicate, since so much of the Web is text-based. But I wonder, will that soon to change? Are we beginning to experience a more visually and audially oriented Web, what with an increasing reliance on interface and graphics to convey meaning? Visual and audial literacy may be the first emergent literacies for young children (what child in the US cannot recognize the McDonald's arches from an early age, or sing the "itsy-bitsy spider?), thought of as pre-reading skills, but then largely dismissed after one has learned to read for meaning. Are the new literacy merely a scaffolding support for reading comprehension as one transitions from a beginning to fluent reader, or can visual information convey complex and sophisticated narratives that stand alone as fully-articulated systems of meaning? And are these visual and audial narratives culturally independent, or are we bound in some way to the indigenous narratives of the social milieu we come from? Can these new literacies transcend culture and become a way to convey meaning cross-culturally? One of my colleagues investigates the world of hip-hop dance and music as a means for facilitating global-awareness in the areas of environmental ecology, social justice, and culture. Certainly hip-hop, which grew out of the street poetry and roots music of the rap musicians in the urban African-American communities, is considered highly culturally dependent. However, in it's spread through popular media, in film, music, and games, hip-hop has drawn people together from diverse backgrounds in every corner of the globe. Each culture is sure to project their own narratives onto the structure of the hip-hop beat, and will create new meanings pertinent to their social and political issues, but the main idea will be carried further by the disseminative nature of the Web (think YouTube and Google video) and influence others in worlds quite different from the original. Will the Web, by it's nature, change the way we think of learning and communication?

Becoming Multiliterate ...

For so many months, I have been living with these ideas, writing and composing deeply thoughtful pieces on multiple literacies. As an educator for the past fourteen years in K-12 and higher education, I am passionate about teaching kids in ways that engage and inspire. I don't have a clue how to solve the current problems in the American educational system, but if I had a roomful of kids and had to teach them math, or science, or reading and writing, I know that by the end of the day they would be excited about the things they were learning. Why aren't we reaching kids with the content we teach? We think its pretty exciting, why don't the kids? Because we are teaching and assessing them in ways that are contrary to the way they learn.

This post marks the first of many that will document my journey into the hallowed confines of the academic publishing world, as I look to publish my first book chapter, and eventually, my first book. I will be sharing ideas, theories, models and rhetorical arguments as I develop my brand as an educational researcher. This blog will serve as my very public whiteboard, and will hopefully inspire you to follow and contribute as well. I encourage you to add this blog to your RSS feeds, or at least bookmark it and check back often. Things are going to get interesting ...