Finding the community of faculty interested in new literacy

I recently met Carol Holder, a specialist in teaching writing, who wrote an an article on New Media and New Literacies. I'd recommend reading the article, and following the links in it.

Holder worries that faculty, courses and academic programs are stuck in the past while new media and new modes of communication are rapidly evolving. She wonders what it will take to see new media, multi modal literacies, and curriculum and instructional change at colleges and universities, and goes on to give examples of people using and talking about new media and literacies.

She begins with the use of tools like email, wikis and shared documents in traditional writing classes. Next she describes Calibrated Peer Review, a highly structured writing service developed by the UCLA chemistry faculty. (I think it is too complex and structured, but you should check it out).

The second half of the article describes journals, Web sites and blogs, which serve the community of faculty in composition, rhetoric, and communication who are exploring new literacies in their scholarship and teaching. I will cover them in future posts, but if I were you, I would check them out now -- don't wait for me.

More data on student IT experience and expectations

We've discussed our student's preparation -- what they do and do not know when they start school. The Educause Center for Applied Research (ECAR) conducts an annual study of students and information technology.

They have published the following on the 2007 study:

• An abstract
  
• The study methodology, including the student survey and interview
• A presentation highlighting the study results

The highlights include many observations, including these:

What do students do with IT?



How much IT do students want in their classes?


(Unfortunately, the full study requires a paid ECAR membership)

Would you like to include your students in future surveys? If so, contact Judy Caruso, judy.caruso@cio.wisc.edu.

Digital visual literacy -- creating and interpreting images

Educause conducts hour long webcasts of topics of interest to University IT faculty and staff. Some of them have been relevant to computer literacy. For example, the program this week was Digital Visual Literacy: Interdisciplinary Skills for the 21st-Century Learner.

The webcast presents an NSF-sponsored project that began at the Brown University Computer Science Department, which is known for computer graphics. The project is based on the premise that digital literacy -- the ability to create and critically interpret visual images like graphs, photos and drawings -- is critical in the 21st century.

You might like to incorporate one of their teaching modules as part of a course you teach. The modules are:

• Introduction to Digital Visual Literacy
• Practical Visual Copyright Skills
• Visual Rhetoric for Blogs
• Visual Dialog in ECommerce
• Graphics Literacy
• 3D Graphics
• Visual Display of Information using Word 2003
• Visual Display of Information using Power Point 2003
• Influencing Decisions with Charts using Excel 2003
• Visual Display of Information in Word 2007
• Effective Visual Display of Information using Power Point 2007
• Influencing Decisions with Charts using Excel 2007

All of the teaching material is free, and they encourage us to use it, develop related material, and give them feedback -- to form a community of visual literacy teachers. You can get the modules and learn more here. (Before you can download modules, you must request a password by sending an email to co-principal investigator Oris Friesen, oris@cox.net).

Click here for archives of previous Educause Live webcasts.

Gathering data on what our students know and don't know

We've talked about what typical students know and don't know about IT. The accepted wisdom is that new students are "digital natives," who know more than we do. However, the knowledge of some digital natives is shallow and brittle -- an inch deep and a mile wide.

Sociologist Eszter Hargittai has studied the content creation and sharing behavior and the digital literacy of undergraduate students at the ethnically diverse University of Illinois, Chicago. Her findings are summarized in an interview entitled A Sociologist Says Students Aren't So Web-Wise After All.

The interview draws upon research reported by Hargittai and Gina Walejko in The Participation Divide: Content Creation and Sharing in the Digital Age. You might also be interested in this article, which defines Hargittai's measure of digital literacy.

It would be interesting to put a version of Hargittai's digital literacy survey on the Net. It could be used to gather data on the general public, employees of organizations, students at other universities, etc. If such a survey caught on, it would be a way to gather data and track trends over time.

Check out Campus Technology magazine

I find something interesting in every issue of Campus Technology Magazine. For example, the current issue has an article on Wikis, Blogs, and More, by Matt Villano.

Villano describes the teaching applications of Jerry Kane at Boston College and Mark Frydenberg at Bentley College. He also describes several administrative applications. I am not particularly interested in administrative applications, but demonstrating them on campus might ease the way for the funding of services that can be also used by faculty in the classroom.

Campus Technology offers a number of newsletters, including one on Web 2.0. They also organize a conference, and this year the topic is Welcome to Next Gen .Edu!.

Mark Frydenberg -- using a wiki and Popfly

The business school at Bentley College offers a mandatory Introduction to Technology from a Business Perspective course for incoming freshmen. For students who do not need the standard introduction to IT concepts and Microsoft Office, they offer special sections. One of those, the "technology intensive" section, is taught by Mark Frydenberg. The course varies from term to term, but Frydenberg is trying to present basic IT concepts through the lens of Web 2.0.

You can review the syllabus, class wiki, and student blogs and contributions at the course Web site, but let me highlight a couple of items.

Freydenberg encourages the students to take control of the course via the class wiki. For example, students are assigned to post and revise class notes on the wiki each week. They are also encouraged to suggest exam questions, with answers and discussion. You can hear Frydenberg discuss their use of the wiki in this two-minute audio excerpt from a longer video interview.

Frydenberg also includes a taste of programming in his class. The emphasis is on algorithmic thinking and programming concepts like input-process-output, object, method, property, parameter, data type, and repetition, selection and sequential execution.

In past semesters, he has used simple VB.NET assignments to illustrate these concepts, but, with his focus on Web 2.0, has switched to Microsoft Popfly. He has developed two simple applications -- a coin toss program and a mashup between Microsoft Virtual Earth and an RSS feed of real estate listings. These not only illustrate the programming concepts he teaches, they illustrate aspects of Web 2.0 -- RSS, a mapping mashup, and easily incorporating an application into a Web page or blog post.

They also illustrate the power of building an application on top of network resources -- the students are surprised by how easy it is to create a complex application -- these Popfly programs are surely more impressive than the temperature conversion programs Freydenberg used when teaching with VB.NET. (This is similar to our contrasting an application developed using an Internet database service with the equivalent ASP.NET application).

Freydenberg demonstrates these applications and discusses his use of them in teaching programming concepts in this video.

Teaching Internet writing in a recreation and tourism managment course

One of the skills we might consider as part of computer literacy 3.0 is writing for the Internet.

We have also asked whether computer literacy should be spread throughout the curriculum or taught in one or more dedicated core courses

Larry Beck's course Wilderness and the Leisure Experience provides a good example of teaching Internet writing skills as part of a non-dedicated course. Beck provides small groups of students with the rough outline of a report, and they research and write it using a wiki. In doing so, they practice organizing themselves for collaborative writing and learn the mechanics of wiki and image processing software. Beck describes his course here, and you can see examples of student work here.

Beck spends a little time on a simple overview of the mechanics of using the wiki, and the students figure out the rest on their own. Someone in the group can usually help the others with the technology if need be. He gives them general instructions on the report outline and writing process, and requires periodic progress-check meetings with them.

See this presentation for an assessment Beck's experiments. (The writing portion begins with slide 23).