Mark Bernstein turns us on to Hypertext 07 and to opportunities for hypertext artists. Another of his posts lead me to Weblogg-ed and Couros, a digital literacies weblog.
All of these issues reflect tight subjects of mine, especially the integration of tech into teaching and learning. My emphasis has always been on what I would call a natural integration of technology into practice and into life, lines that are often hard to trace, given that technology accompanies us and emerges around us. In school I never thought about chalk or blackboards as technology until I had to spell words in front of people in a class room or had a presentation thwarted by a plug. I’d never really thought about school as technology until I learned about its shaping over time.
I’ve seen many examples of overload on people in educational setting and I’ve come to think that overload is typically the result of forced use of technology. If I create a game environment that teaches, how much of this kind of load could a student take if all her/his courses expected deep immersion in a learning environment.
Will people soon be overloaded with the read/write web, or is one of the keys to new media literacy: knowing what to cut out of one’s field of view?
Leu writes, “he continuously changing technologies of literacy mean that we must help children learn how to learn new technologies of literacy. In fact, the ability to learn continuously changing technologies for literacy may be a more critical target than learning any particular technology of literacy itself”. I think it’s more than this. The critical filter, learning the critical filter is everything. We must help students to understand what is worth reading, how to find the relevant voices in the huge raving river of information, and then be able to engage in conversations with what they have learned, and who they have learned from.