Marla Sanders
Binamig@gmail.com

April 29, 2009

Orchestrating the Media Collage by Jason Ohler

Overview of article

The author discusses the benchmarks of digital literacy. In contrast to every other technology, which developed from inception to ubiquity over many decades or centuries, modern digital technologies advance exponentially fast. Take, for example, the telephone. Invented just before the turn of the 20th century, long distance calling was still a luxury well into the 1970’s. Now contrast that to the internet. Though ‘invented’ decades before, the World Wide Web was not widely available until the early 1990’s but what a whirl wind of growth in both performance and application!

Why has digital technology advanced so fast? The difference is that digital technology is a two way street. Unlike previous communicaton technologies that had producers who designed, developed and distributed a product which consumers then used as intended by the producers; digital technology is, with increasing regularity developed by the consumer and consumed by the developer.

The line between the two is blurring so fast that many will be left out altogether. It is no longer enough to access blog sites; one must be able to produce them as well. And by the time I had typed that last statement it too was an obsolete truth. It is not enough to produce a blog—or produce a Power Point presentation—or produce coherent text. One must now be proficient at including sound and moving pictures; indeed one must produce a collage of all of the above, “[one] must be able to use new media collectively as well as individually.”

Mr. Ohler suggests eight guidelines for teachers to follow so as to “promote the crucial skills associated with digital literacy”:

Shift from text centrism to media collage.

1. Shift from text centrism to media collage.
2. Value writing and reading now more than ever.
3. Adopt art as the next R.
4. Blend traditional and emerging literacies.
5. Harness report and story.
6. Practice private and participatory social literacy.
7. Develop literacy with digital tools and about digital tools.
8. Pursue fluency.
   

Reference Points

• “Being able to actively create rather than just passively consume new media is important for the obvious reason that it teaches literacy and job skills that are highly valued in a digital society.”
• A person is a reader if they can read but liteate if they can also write in a medium.
• “Pressure is on for students to think and write clearly and precisely if they are to be effective contributors to the collective narrative of the Web.
• “The DAOW of literacy”: Digital, Art, Oral, and Written.
• The media collage is the new “normal” way to express oneself in the world.
• Teachers that are not comfortable with the new technologies can still be effective by guiding their students that are toward being highly literate while thay use it.

Reflection

What I really liked about this article is that it clearly describes our student’s relationship to technology and media—outside of school. Like it or not, parents these days are more likely to buy our students a new ipod than they are to regularly tell them to turn it off and do their homework. I don’t like it but that’s the world we now teach in. If we ever hope to compete with our student’s out of school lives for relevance, we must do it using the same technologies that they crave.

If we don’t step up soon and guide our student’s media product toward the professional or sophisticated; it could be too late. I can see the future clearly: I’m trapped in my nursing home bed, gasping for breath and my nurse texts me on my cell phone…RUOK? What the…?