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Online Learning News and Research
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Thursday, October 10, 2002
http://www.usdla.org/html/journal/OCT02_Issue/article05.html The New Literacy Stephen Downes Time and again we hear from academics bemoaning the loss of the cultivated and literate student in today's schools, the victim, they say, of a multi-media diet of McDonalds, music videos and post-modernist pabulum. Such students fail, moan the critics, to engage in complex dialogue and complex thought. They are capable of understanding only simple and sanitized text, and even then only when it is accompanied with moving pictures and a soundtrack. I have spent a large part of my working life in the company of the literati, listening to their seminars, attending their lectures, reading their journalistic contributions to the pool of public knowledge. For me, the greatest invention of recent years has been the introduction of wireless networking so I can have something to do while waiting through the interminable gaps in their reasoned arguments. Even while reading, I prefer to have the radio or television playing to occupy my mind as I wade my way through the text. I am not alone, as one exasperated instructor after another struggles to keep online clat to a minimum during class time. Scollon (et.al.) calls this polyfocal attention: "Perhaps the most striking thing about our students' attention is that it is polyfocal. That is, very rarely do they direct their attention in a focal, concentrated way to any single text or medium....
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