Reflections on ETC 2010
So here's a few ideas that I got out of the ETC 2010 conference. Digital literacies aren't even on the road map for a lot of people at this conference, which is a shame but also an opportunity. Anytime I brought up in conversation that there needs to be a digital literacies course for students (and faculty as well) that looks at evaluating information online, as well as developing skills for creating media in this new paradigm, people thought it was a good idea, but weren't sure how to proceed beyond that.
Adobe is seriously making a play to solidify their position in education in a smart way - from the student's perspective. They've given away their software to students at several institutions, presumably as a loss-leader, pitching it as an enrollment perk to attract students. The other thing is Adobe's really good at analyzing a market and identifying gaps, which their new ePortfolio tool somewhat addresses. ePortfolio is part of the Acrobat product, and allows you to grab a folder of stuff (really, they claim any file will work) and import it into ePortfolio, and it will export it as a PDF. So your SWF? Plays in PDF. Your 3D drawing from AutoCAD? Imports and acts as a 3D object in the PDF. First thing I thought was that this was a way around the Flash issue on the iPhone, but after asking a few questions it seemed like it wasn't the goal. It's a neat side effect though, if it works.
There was a lot of talk about time management, filtering, how to manage information and information overload (or filter failure as Will Richardson said). Both keynotes made mention of it, but neither talked about tools to help you aggregate information in any depth. A missed opportunity in my presentation, would have been to pick up that thread and go with that angle. I did see a presentation that did the opposite of that, which was about search engines that were not Google and video sites that aren't YouTube. I'm not sure if people want more information, that's why they stay with Google or YouTube, those are the trusted sources. It's going to be very very hard to fight against those properties because of the entrenched nature of those two sites.
Something that I overheard, which was "we've been told that Wikipedia is a bad source for years!" That statement seemed a bit odd, seeing as we've seen a study saying that half of the people who edit wikipedia have a Master's degree or better. We've also seen that corporate entities have sanitized their pages as well. I think Wikipedia is fine as a starting point, but really the interesting discussion to have is about what it means when everyone is a consumer and a producer, and even more importantly, what happens to what is good in this new paradigm.
The New-New Literacy
Happy New Year! I'm not going to do a top ten or predict (ala Karnak or Kreskin) the future. Instead if that ripe old adage is true, I'm going to look back to look ahead.
We've all heard about digital literacy, and how it's going to be important going forward from here on out. George Siemens has published a couple of blog posts that I wanted to comment on, and I think that it might be a bit more coherent to do so here. George wrote a little bit about the Pirate Hoax and it's implications for what digital literacy means. I think his commentary is dead on, in that people must adopt a very skeptical approach to what they read (even here!). A problem with a skeptical approach is that it can lead to a very silo'd way of thinking, where anything that is outside your particular view can easily be dismissed by finding minor problems with the data or information, or holding information to such a high standard to meet that it never climbs the mountain, so to speak. Skepticism must be tempered with an openness, a willing to suspend belief for a period of time to accept an alternative point of view.
George then writes about the New York Times Visualization Lab, and their adoption of more visualizations. While this isn't new, (all the news that's fit to visualize?) we've been hearing about declining text literacy for years, the contextual arguments about visualizations certainly exist. Is there a difference in a pie chart versus a bar chart? How far apart are the variables spaced? Colors of pie pieces influence funding? Most people don't consider how these factors influence or can influence decisions. The new new literacy has to include this sort of thinking, and understanding of how we can be manipulated by visuals.
Two of my favourite sites Flowing Data and Infosthetics deal with this sort of visual literacy, in addition to highlighting the creative, artistic sides to data. If you haven't visited either site, please take a gander at them, they are really spectacular.