Excerpt from Working Paper on Literacy #2

Media literacy, information technology

Drs. Chris Abbott, Lecturer in Education at Kings College, London. Len Masterman, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool.

[This article is an excerpt from an advisory document produced by Chris Abbott and Len Masterman in February 1997 which considers some of the major implications of information and media technologies for the teaching of English. The context for their analysts is the UK, but their observations transcend national boundaries and provide a framework for thinking about the links between literacy as conceived in traditional English teaching and the broader literacies called for by media and information technologies. The full document is available as Working Paper On Literacy, No 2, from The Centre for Literacy. (LS)]

In this document, we draw together in summarized form:

1. Some common issues and questions raised by information, communication and media technologies.

2. Some important areas of difference.

3. Some key issues and questions raised by these technologies for English curriculum planning.

4. Implications for the National Curriculum in English (UK) including the basic components of an effective media education within English.

[Ed. note: Parts (a) and (b) are reprinted here. ]

a) Some common issues and questions raised by information and media technologies

1. Both ICT and the mass media raise immediate questions about the impact of relatively new and still developing technologies upon the traditional processes of literacy teaching and cultural continuity as embodied within English. In particular these technologies have unsettled many of English's most basic assumptions and compelled us all to look again at what we mean by communicative competence, reading, writing, criticality, authorship, audience etc.

2. The widespread availability of and access to these technologies in the UK .... raise questions about the implications of these technologies for majorities of people. These questions are both utilitarian (How can they be used most effectively?) and cultural (What are their wider cultural implications?).

   The ways in which these technologies will be used in the English classroom will be vital to the wider processes of social and cultural inclusion or exclusion. Whereas much English teaching in the past has been devoted to the defense of minority culture, and has produced differential access to cultural and linguistic competencies, the new technologies encourage the development of more pluralistic and diverse perspectives. Information will no longer be under the control of the teacher, for example, but will be called up at the discretion of the pupil. The new technologies transform the role of development. A pupil's abilities in accessing, organizing, and critically interpreting information from the widest diversity of sources become of paramount importance.

3. Whilst media and information technologies are very different, there is a growing degree of convergence between them, exemplified by the coming digitalization of television, and the increasing interactivity between computer, telephone, television, satellite and cable systems. The different technologies, then, raise a larger set of common social and cultural issues: about ownership and control of information sources; about the commodification of information; about globalization and media imperialism; about cultural identity; about the kind of information which does and does not get produced, and why.

4. Whilst many of these issues may seem somewhat theoretical and remote from the concerns of most school pupils, in fact they impinge directly on the experiences of even the youngest children. The technologies themselves are child-friendly, and can be used by children independently of adults. And children are an important target market for many commercial and cultural global products (Cultural imperialism is often referred to as "Coca-Colonization or Disneyfication," for example). The critical agenda developed by media education has a wider application across all of the technologies and can help to denaturalize the taken-for-granted processes of information and cultural transmission for all school pupils.

5. Both technologies hold out the possibility of either restricted or elaborated forms of literacy: of literacy as either a set of merely technical competencies, or as a fuller repertoire of critical questions and approaches.

6. Both technologies promise more interactive ways of working than is generally provided by paper-based and literary forms of communication. They raise the basic distinction between information and knowledge, and help promote an understanding of knowledge as a construction, a product of the interaction of information and the critical questioning.

7. Both technologies raise fundamental questions of values. Whilst English teaching has had as its moral Centre the notion of literary value, the belief that a selective tradition of literary texts embodies and crystallizes those liberal-humanist, civilized and civilizing values which lie at the heart of the good society, the newer technologies raise equally fundamental questions about the preservation of democratic and humane values in an Information Society.

   The new technologies are implicated in contemporary discussions on human rights at all levels. Not only is the exercise of basic political, civil and social rights now highly dependent upon the ability to access and interpret information from computer and media sources, but communication rights are now themselves recognized as constituting a distinctive "third generation" of human rights. These communication rights go beyond rights of access to information to include expressive rights (in the word of one international report, "the right of local communities and minorities of an kinds to make their voices heard"), rights to reciprocity and exchange of information rights of access to those skills and discourses which will enable citizens to interpret, make their own sense of and produce their own messages from the new technologies.

8. Although we have been concerned to stress the functional, creative and critical uses of both media and ICT within English, it should be emphasized that we are not advocating a "technology-centre" approach to English teaching, nor any kind of reduction of English to a series of technical operations. The technologies do not replace English, but call for an extension of the English agenda into new areas and using new tools.

b) Some important areas of difference

1. Basic media and computer "literacies" are very different. They involve the encoding and decoding of different symbolic forms. Apart from the mastery of keyboard skills, computer literacy has been, within English, largely print-based, and the development of print and computer literacies have proceeded in parallel. The media, on the other hand, are primarily iconic systems which can be decoded without formal teaching. Engagement with the idea that the media are indeed symbolic systems and not simply reflections of reality constitutes the beginnings of media literacy.

2. The two technologies have made their major impacts upon different parts of the English curriculum. It is the cultural implications of the media and the threat they have posed to traditional literary volumes that have traditionally been of greatest concern and it is in the area of "critical reading" that the media continue to make their most significant mark, albeit that the aims and purposes of "critical reading" are subject to the most vigorous debate.

   ICT has arguably made its greatest impact in the sphere of writing, where the once "advanced" skills of planning, drafting, correcting, re-drafting can now be taken with pupils at KS 1 and 2 [key skills levels as defined in the UK national Curriculum]. However, in recent years, the advent of CDROM multimedia texts and interactive World Wide Web sites has made ICT central to reading too. With speech synthesis now commonplace and speech recognition affordable, speaking and listening are also poised to make use of new tools.

3. In general it can be said that whereas ICT is essentially a set of technologies which can enable teachers and pupils to achieve more easily and creatively objectives traditionally associated with English teaching, media education is a discipline with its own rationale, core concepts and modes of investigation. It is thus distinct from English (in a way that the use of ICT within English is not), though, as a text-centred activity it has much in common with it.

4. A major distinction between ICT and Media is frequently made on the grounds that whereas the media are essentially one-way communication systems which encourage passivity, ICT promotes greater involvement and interactivity.

5. In fact a formidable body of research has demonstrated the range and variety of interactions which audiences have with the media, whose consumption is generally integrated into a whole round of domestic rituals. The primary function of media education is precisely to promote as wide and sophisticated range of interaction with the media as possible. Media literacy students tend to answer back, shout at, interrupt and carry on a continuous dialogue with their media, frequently within the social context which is itself complexly interactive. The kind of interactivity offered by ICT in the past compared rather poorly with even the most limited forms of social interaction. The hyperbole surrounding ICT's interactivity can even be read as a PR response to the considerable technical deficiencies of computers in the sphere of interaction.

   A deficit model of ICT sees it as a selection from a limited number of pre-set tasks, a definition which might have been true of the drill and practice programs or interactive adventures of the 1980s but is woefully inadequate for the present day. Creating a totally original city with all its services, using LOGO to create rather than play an adventure and producing a fully-authored multimedia package are activities which are eons away from previous uses of ICT and they can be seen in many classrooms.

   It would be true to say, however, that the lack of interest by English teachers in aspects of ICT in society has meant that rather less progress has been made in pursuing the really interactive questions: how that media has been constructed, whose interests it serves, the values implicit in it, what has been omitted from it, and who is allowed and denied access to it.