Download Literacidades digitales y aprendizaje basado en

Literacidades digitales y aprendizaje basado en investigación
mediada por recursos de la Web 2.0
Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel
Invited Keynote paper
II Semenario Internacional de Lectura en la Universidad (2nd International Seminar in Reading in the
University) I Congreso Nacional de Expresiones de Cultura Escrita en Instiuciones de Educacion
Media Superior y Superior (1st National Congress in Expressions of Written Culture in Tertiary
Education). Aguascalientes, Mexico, 7 August 2010.
Introduction
This paper describes a context in which participants acquire multiple “literacies” simultaneously and
conjointly through a learning approach that is in many ways unconventional within formal academic
programs in higher education. We discuss some of the ways in which this approach reflects a range
of wider contemporary trends, and consider some of its potential for bridging gaps and tensions
between competing cultures of learning.
The nature, purpose and context of the learning
We are employed to teach some courses in a Masters of Education program in Canada concerned
with literacy. We were asked to design courses that did two main things:
(a) Address the theme of “new” literacies/ digital literacies/new media (in theory and in practice)
(b) Provide an introduction to literacy research and to researching literacy: how to discover and use
literacy research effectively as teachers, and how do research. This meant helping the teachers who
take the courses to become informed consumers of research and to get some experience of being
producers of research.
There are 10 courses in the overall Masters program and we teach two of them. The program is
offered in several provinces in Canada where the university does not have a campus. In fact, only a
small proportion of the students enrolled in the program do any work on campus. The program
organizers recruit cohorts in the different places where the program is offered, and “takes” the
program to the students. In addition, the program has been designed to suit the rhythms and
schedules of teachers. It is offered in two modes:
(a) In summer there is an intensive mode, comprising one full time week of face to face work in the
company of the professors and one full time-equivalent week of structured reading and completing
assigned tasks
(b) During the semesters courses run over a period of 12-14 weeks. There are three full day face to
face workshops led by the professors, and the remainder of the work is done “at distance” between
the 3 workshop sessions.
Participants are all teachers or education administrators. They pay full fees and almost all are mainly
doing the degree for career advancement purposes. The program is evaluated on a Pass/Fail basis.
There are no grade variations: participants either Pass or they Fail.
In the courses we are responsible for ,we combine the process of learning to become “research
literate” with the process of learning about new literacies and learning some “new” literacies. They
learn how to read and to write research proficiently in combination with learning to theorize and to
practice new literacies. These elements are absolutely integrated; tightly interwoven. We think of
this as a kind of productive interactivity between becoming competent theorists and practitioners in
the area of “new” literacies, and becoming proficient readers/consumers and writers/producers of
research in the area of new literacies.
The theoretical and conceptual foundations of the courses
The conception and practice of the courses build on a mix of elements from sociocultural theory and
elements of theories and speculations about contemporary social, technological, and economic
change.
From the standpoint of sociocultural theory, learning does not focus on children, or minds, or
schools but, rather “on human lives seen as trajectories through multiple social practices in various
social institution”s. For learning to be efficacious, what a learner learns at any point in time “must
be connected in meaningful and motivating ways with 'mature' (insider) versions of related social
practices” (Gee, Hull and Lankshear 1996: 4). Learning is ultimately accountable to proficient
performance in social practices and what Gee (1996) calls “Discourses” and Wittgenstein (1953)
called “forms of life”. These are meaningful ways of doing and being that integrate and “coordinate” purposes, tools, ways of speaking and writing, actions and skills, knowledge and
understanding, ways of dressing and interacting, and so on within material contexts and situations.
From a sociocultural perspective learning is about becoming “Discourse competent”. In the case of
our courses, participants are being challenged to get started on becoming Discourse competent as
teacher researchers (of their own learning) simultaneously with starting to become Discourse
competent as digital media producers.
Gee draws on this perspective when he distinguishes between “deep learning” and the kind of
surface learning that often results from an emphasis on decontextualized subject content within
formal education. By “deep learning” Gee means learning that can generate “real understanding,
the ability to apply one’s knowledge, and even to transform that knowledge for innovation”, and he
argues that if we want to encourage deep learning it is necessary to move beyond “learning about”
and, instead, focus on “learning to be” (Gee 2007: 172, our italics). He claims that deep learning
requires that learners are “willing and able to take on a new identity in the world, to see the world
and act on it in new ways” (ibid). In part, this points to the materiality and situatedness of deep
learning, where ideas and “content” is grounded in specific tasks, interactions, purposes, actions,
outcomes, and the like. In addition, however, if one is learning to be an historian, or a music video
creator it is necessary for them to see and value things about the world and their work or activity in
the ways that historians and music video creators do. Among other things, this is because
in any domain, if knowledge is to be used, the learner must probe the world (act on it
with a goal) and then evaluate the result. Is it “good” or “bad,” “adequate” or
“inadequate,” “useful” or “not,” “improvable” or “not”? (ibid.)
Gee argues that this involves learners developing the kind of value system that Donald Schön calls
an “appreciative system” as a basis for making such judgments. Appreciative systems
are embedded in the identities, tools, technologies, and worldviews of distinctive
groups of people—who share, sustain, and transform them—groups like doctors,
carpenters, physicists, graphic artists, teachers, and so forth through a nearly endless
list (ibid.).
These ideas resonate with John Seely Brown and Richard Adler's (2008) account of “social
learning”. By “social learning,” Seely Brown and Adler mean learning based on the assumption that
our understanding of concepts and processes is constructed socially in conversations about the
matters in question and ‘through grounded [and situated] interactions, especially with others,
around problems or actions (2008, p. 18). From a social learning perspective, the focus is more on
how we learn than on what we learn. It shifts the emphasis from ‘the content of a subject to the
learning activities and human interactions around which that content is situated’ (p. 18). This is just
the kind of engagement and process a DIY media creator experiences when, for example, s/he
interacts with peers to resolve (what turns out to be) a file compatibility or file conversion problem
in the course of creating an AMV or a machinima movie.
Social learning puts the emphasis squarely on “learning to be” (Seely Brown and Adler 2008, p. 18;
Gee 2007, p. 172). According to Seely Brown and Adler (2008, p. 19),
mastering a field of knowledge involves not only “learning about” the subject matter
but also “learning to be” a full participant in the field. This involves acquiring the
practices and the norms of established practitioners in that field or acculturating into
a community of practice.
Current theories and speculation about technological and economic change also contribute
important ideas to our understanding of learning under contemporary conditions. John Hagel and
John Seely Brown's account of an emerging paradigm shift in our everyday thinking about how to
mobilize resources for getting things done has important implications for how to think about
education and learning.
In their discussion of emerging models for mobilizing resources, John Hagel and John Seely Brown
(2005, p.1) observe that in the course of their daily lives people perceive and act on the basis of “
‘common sense’ assumptions about the world around us and the requirements to meet our goals”
(ibid.). Such assumptions collectively make up “common sense models” for judgment, decisionmaking and action within everyday routines. Hagel and Seely Brown claim that each major
technology shift generates a new common sense model, and that in the context of contemporary
technology innovations—notably, the microprocessor and packet-switched electronic networks
dating from the 1970s—we are now “on the cusp of a shift to a new common sense model” that will
reshape many facets of our lives (ibid.).
They describe this emerging new common sense model in terms of a shift away from “push”
approaches toward “pull” approaches. This shift can in turn be understood in terms of a
convergence between the twin needs to confront uncertainty (itself partly a consequence of recent
technological innovations) and to promote sustainability, on the one hand, and the opportunities
technological innovations offer for meeting these same needs, on the other. Hagel and Seely
Brown’s argument has particular relevance to educators, because education/learning is a major
sphere of resource mobilization, and to the extent that the projected shift from “push” to “pull”
plays out, education/schooling will be impacted in far-reaching ways.
Throughout the 20th century the dominant common sense model for mobilizing resources was based
on the logic of “push.” Resource needs were anticipated or forecast, budgets drawn up, and
resources pushed in advance to sites of anticipated need so they would be in place when needed.
This “push” approach involved intensive and often large-scale planning and program development.
Indeed, Hagel and Seely Brown see programs as being integral to the “push” model. They note, for
example, that in education the process of mobilizing resources involves designing standard curricula
that ‘expose students to codified information in a predetermined sequence of experiences’ (p. 3).
Education, in fact, is a paradigm case of the push model at work.
According to Hagel and Seely Brown we are now seeing early signs of an emerging “pull” approach
within education, business, technology, media, and elsewhere, that creates platforms rather than
programs: platforms “that help people to mobilize resources when the need arises” (p. 3). More than
this, the kinds of platforms we see emerging are designed to enable individuals and groups to do
more with fewer resources, to innovate in ways that actually create new resources where previously
there were none, and to otherwise add value to the resources we have access to. Pull approaches
respond to uncertainty and the need for sustainability by seeking to expand opportunities for
creativity on the part of “local participants dealing with immediate needs” (p. 4). From this
standpoint, uncertainty is seen as creating opportunities to be exploited. According to Hagel and
Seely Brown, pull models
help people to come together and innovate in response to unanticipated events,
drawing upon a growing array of highly specialized and distributed resources. Rather
than seeking to constrain the resources available to people, pull models strive to
continually expand the choices available while at the same time helping people to find
the resources that are most relevant to them. Rather than seeking to dictate the
actions that people must take, pull models seek to provide people on the periphery
with the tools and resources (including connections to other people) required to take
initiative and creatively address opportunities as they arise. .. Pull models treat
people as networked creators (even when they are customers purchasing goods and
services) who are uniquely positioned to transform uncertainty from a problem into an
opportunity. Pull models are ultimately designed to accelerate capability building by
participants, helping them to learn as well as innovate, by pursuing trajectories of
learning that are tailored to their specific needs (p. 4)
Jay Cross (2006) summarizes what he sees as the key differences between “push” and “pull”
approaches to education generally and learning more specifically in the following tables.
Push and pull in relation to education generally
Push
Pull
Training
Learning
Curriculum
Discovery
Courses
Performance support
Training program
Collaboration platform
Mandated
Self service
Just in case
Just in time
(Cross 2006: 38; citing Brown & Hagel 2005)
Push and Pull in relation to learning specifically
Push
Pull
Assumes you can predict
demand
Assumes the world is
unpredictable
Anticipates
Responds
Rigid, static
Flexible, dynamic
Conform, core
Innovate, edge
Monoliths, components glued
together
Small pieces loosely joined
Program
Learnscape
(Cross 2006: 39, citing Brown & Hagel 2005)
Cross's idea of a collaboration platform has particular significance for our courses. The key to
collaboration platforms is the enabling capacity of what are widely referred to as Web 2.0 services
and applications.
Web 2.0 Notes
The enabling services of Web 2.0 are not packages, or artefacts, or consumables, but resources that
have to be performed: “things” like search engines, or wikis, or blog services, or user-content
management services like YouTube, or photosharing facilities like Flickr, etc. You don’t get any
product per se when you register with and access such services. Rather, you get an opportunity to
“drive them” and what you get from them depends on how you perform them.
The efficiency, efficacy, or value-producing capacity of many Web 2.0 enabling services or
resources is a function of large scale leverage. What makes Google’s search engine so powerful and
effective is not just that it is user friendly or convenient but, rather, that so many people use it and
in doing so they have built the data base upon which Google draws. Such services facilitate and
mobilise participation and collaboration, often involving literally millions of people whose
contributions added up to something massive – as in the case of Amazon.com’s bibliographic data
base, Wikipedia’s information base as a searchable source,
Since the time that Web 2.0 was first mooted as a business model, the concept has widened to
accommodate widespread social interaction and collaborative relatedness among people who “meet
and interact on the webtop”. The logic is peer-to-peer, interactive, collaborative, and
participatory. Web 2.0 embraces all manner of affinity spaces (Gee 2004), social networking spaces,
interactive and collaborative production spaces, peer-to-peer sharing spaces, collaborative online
working/production spaces and so on (from AMV.org, to eBay, to flickr, to fanfiction.net to Google
docs, etc.). This sense of Web 2.0 emphasizes the importance of Web services that facilitate
working collaboratively with friends and strangers across time and distance. Specific examples of
Web 2.0 applications that encourage such collaboration include sites like Google Docs that support
truly collaborative writing, Fanfiction.net and the recursive role reviews can play there with respect
to authors improving their narrative writing through input from friends and strangers, and voice over
internet services that enable free conference calls across widely dispersed physical locations, to
name just a few.
Scholars like Rebecca Black (2008), David Buckingham (2003), Andrew Burn (2009), Julia Davies
and Guy Merchant (2009), James Gee (2003, 2004, 2007), Henry Jenkins (2006; Jenkins et al.,
2006), Marc Prensky (2006), Will Richardson (2006), Katie Salen (2008), John Seely Brown and
Richard Adler (2008), and Constance Steinkuehler (2008), among others, have discussed at length
how online resources and popular cultural affinities have converged in ways that enable and sustain
modes of learning very different from the predominantly ‘push’ approach of conventional schooling.
In a nutshell, then, in the courses we are describing here we aim to bring together learning about
new literacy theory and learning about research methods and research literature within contexts
where participants have opportunities to begin learning to be(come) new media literacy producers
and qualitative teacher researchers in “hands on” ways, and where they have access to expertise
when they need it (just in time) in order to be able to “go on”.
The teaching and learning approach (“unpedagogy”) within the courses
(a) Before the course begins:


Students receive textbooks as part of the course package
Instructors receive an email list for all participants




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A website (on google sites) is created, containing the course outline and additional resources
Participants receive an email message pointing them to the course website and inviting them
to bring wireless laptops/netbooks to all sessions
Preliminary reading is posted on the web site
Participants know they will be working in teams and can pre-arrange teams or carry them
over from previous courses
In the case of media creation courses a range of options is provided (e.g., machinima, stop
motion animation, music video remix, etc.)
(b) The learning space




Sometimes in a school or on campus (e.g., a classroom, computer lab) but always with ample
available workspace (e.g., the library, foyers, cafeteria, gymnasium, etc.)
Usually in a “non school/campus” space: a ski lodge, a conference hotel, a resource centre
Wireless internet access – this is the “bottom line”.
The other bottom line is that there must always be ample space for teams to spread out and
work as teams
(c) The collaboration platform

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
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
Online library access to electronic journals and data bases, with scholar google preferences
activated
email post course blogs – where any participant can post to the blog by using the email post
option in blogger.com
google sites – readily updatable
google docs – collaborative online writing
google scholar
google books
gmail
The rest of the internet
(d) The learning approach



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



As necessary “expository and explanatory” full group sessions led by us.
As necessary “how to” and “walk through” full group sessions led by us (e.g., establishing
google scholar preferences for their library access, setting up google docs
Heavy reliance on key templates that provide a structure for group work
As many “helpful online sites” URLs provided as necessary
Hands on and “google is your friend”
Exemplars of work by previous cohorts available on website
Teams begin hands on work from the outset and we move group to group
Our role is minimally explicit. Often respond with questions – have you tried?, have you
looked at?


Interaction between groups is encouraged – peer sharing of knowledge and resources
Writing begins on google docs as early as possible and we feedback as often as possible
Typical examples of products and outcomes

In the “research reading”/”informed consumers of research” course – always run as a
semester course – they produce a collaborative written critique of a peer-reviewed published
article of their choice, focusing on aspects of research design, data collection, data analysis,
discussion of analytic results in light of relevant theory, and the appropriateness of
conclusions and implications. Usually at least 7500 words, and almost invariably contain
sustainable judgments about such matters as the quality of demonstration of data analysis,
adequacy of the communicative validity of the research, adequacy and transparency of the
data set and audit trail, etc. i.e., the criteria we emphasize when reviewing for international
journals.

Lego World and The Escape (stop motion animations)

Barroom Brawl (machinima)

Music remix

Worldcuptrip (photoshopping in a photoblog)

A google docs page of research writing, showing us commenting)
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Colour-coded data analysis work
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Sophisticated report page exemplar (e.g., from Shannon's paper)
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A table
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An example of categorical analysis – Teena's one (where they had 3 categories and each had
sub categories)
Discussion/Comment/Conclusion

Writing and learning to be. Most university courses we are familiar with continue to employ
modes of writing that we think of as forms of “doing school”: i.e., essays, narratives, first
person reflective journal writing, pseudo blog entries, compulsory discussion and the like
that are not typical of any substantial real world/professional practices. These courses reject
that and enlist participants in research critique and research report writing, field note and
other forms of data collection, etc., from the outset. In addition, they invite novices to
participate in digital forms of popular cultural media expression according to “insider”
versions of the practices by making them accountable from the outset to the standards and
norms of the forms and genres in question (which are highly visible in the relevant affinity
spaces).

Focus on supported collaborative writing. Participants tell us that the focus on collaborative
writing enables them to produce text that they do not think they would be able to produce
individually within the time frame. They experience being “emboldened” to write; they take
more risks; and they can produce more fluently, confidently and rapidly – which means there
is something “there” to respond to. Often we get to “what is right” by progressively
responding to something that is “not right” – but that has to be there in the first place.
There is a saying in software programming – known as Linus' Law (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27_Law) – that “with enough eyeballs, all bugs are
shallow”. With enough beta testers and co-developers, glitches in code/programming will be
identified quickly and someone will soon come up with the solution. We think we see
something like this happening in the collaborative writing approach in the courses. In
addition, even though individuals may take primary responsibility for particular parts or areas
of the overall report (divvied up on the basis of template structure), each “part” has to coordinate with every other “part”, so that by the end all participants have experience of
working in each “part” and get an understanding of each “part” and how all the parts relate.
The result is that any participant would be able to generate “text” – whether written report
text or digital remix text or video text – in any area of the overall products with sufficient
competence to know how to go on. Moreover, while we often require university students to
produce individual work, all the way through to completing a PhD thesis, the truth is that in
academic professional life as well as in the professional lives of media producers and creators,
production is often, if not typically, collaborative.

Situated writing and lucidly functional language.
In several places, Gee (2004; 2007; 2008) discusses the relationship recognized by sociocultural
learning theorists between effective learning and particular forms of talk and patterns of
participation and interaction. He emphasizes four key important aspects of this relationship.

Distinctive forms of content are associated with distinctive forms of language, and the
connected are made public in talk

Learners need to learn to interpret, analyze, debug, and explain their experiences
(and the connections between goals and reasoning within experience) – all of which can be
rendered public through talk

Learners need to learn from the interpreted experiences of others, their peers and
more expert people in the domain

Communities of practice are, in part, formed through the sorts of talk that allows for
public sharing and joint modeling, building and problem solving.
Referring to the example of Yu-Gi-Oh, a manga-based game popular among children as young as 5
or 6 years, Gee identifies the very specific form of talk – a ‘specific register or social language’ –
required by participants. This language is grounded in the meanings, functions and purposes of YuGi-Oh as a social activity. Unlike the situation so often observed in classrooms, where some
participants have the ‘right’ social language for school learning and others don’t, young Yu-Gi-Oh
players at large can ‘discuss and debate with others in this language on common ground’. This is
not simply because they have talked, however. To a large and important extent it is because ‘they
have played the game and that play has given them embodied, situated meanings for the language’.
Participant involvement in the two discursive domains at the core of these courses – researching
and engaging in new media literacies – illustrates similar tendencies to those identified by Gee in
relation to subjects in studies he has researched, such as the Yu-Gi-Oh players. Indeed, we see
this in spoken and written language alike. For example, in one study a team of people with noo
previous experience learned to assemble and program a Lego kitset robot to perform a simple task.
When they analyzed the data they had collected (using fieldnotes, and audio and video recordings of
their activity and conversations) during the one week in which they assembled and programmed the
robot they saw, graphically, shifts in their language. Within two days they were using technical
terms and phrases they had never previously encountered when going about their work. Arriving at
the basics of a shared language made their work go more rapidly and effectively, and everybody
understood each other because they were acquiring the concepts and phrases and terms within
concrete situations linked to material processes mediated by expert language modeling (in the form
of manuals, online guides, posts in forums, youtube talkthroughs, etc. The same is apparent in the
research dimension where theoretical and methodological concepts and procedures are rendered
public and shared through talk within the teams and between team members and the instructors.
Likewise, the courses provide abundant evidence of situated written language, or situated writing.
Participants begin writing from the outset, but always within material contexts and with tangible
artifacts and objects of the kinds that bona fide research teams encounter. Researchers have to
write like researchers, and this takes many different forms. In data collection for example, they have
to know how to generate usable fieldnotes; they have to know how and when to capture verbatim
speech; they have to know how to transcribe speech reliably; how to recognize an appropriate
opportunity for a screen capture on a computer and to make and store and retrieve it. In data
organization they have to know how to label and classify and summarize in order to aid data
retrieval at the point of analysis. In data analysis one has to be able to render patterns and
categories through use of codes and charts and tables and the like. Writing about triangulation of
data, for example, becomes lucidly functional in the presence of data pertaining to a specific event
or instance when team members collectively bring spoken and observational data to bear upon it,
and when they bring complementary perspectives to bear upon it grounded in what they have seen
and heard.
Conclusion
Of course, participants are in no ways experts or well prepared independent digital media producers
or researchers after the courses. They have had either an intensive fortnight or a largely “working
at distance” semester-long introduction to a new Discourse and discourse. By the same token, as
we have tried to show here, it seems fair to say that they make noteworthy entrees into forms of
reading and writing that are integral to the postgraduate professional formation of teachers under
contemporary conditions.
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