Federman’s article discussed at Weblogg-Ed
From Weblogg-Ed (I haven’t read the Federman article yet, but it looks fascinating):
I love questions, especially ones that make me think real hard about the answer. Maybe that’s why I’m having so much fun these days, ’cause there are so many difficult questions being posed about education and technology and the mixture of the two.
Via Harold Jarche comes a link to someone else who is posing big questions, Mark Federman of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. Like this one from his essay titled “Why Johnny And Janey Can’t Read, and Why Mr. And Ms. Smith Can’t Teach: The challenge of multiple media literacies in a tumultuous time [pdf]“:
“What is valued as knowledge, who decides, and who is valued as authority?”
Ok, just my opinion, but I think this should be must reading for this community. The way in which Federman structures this essay is downright masterful, and the ideas it conveys are profound. As usual, here are a few snips with some hopefully cogent reactions.
Federman traces literacy from the oral tradition through the introduction of the alphabet through Gutenberg’s press through the introduction of Morse Code and he does it in a pretty captivating narrative. Let’s just say I learned a lot (including why the Cluetrain Manifesto has 95 theses…guess I missed that part of history class.) Especially interesting to me was the way in which he discusses the way in which we assign authority to authorship:
“When we invoke knowledge that we obtain through the proxy of an author’s book, we assume some of that author’s patina of authority.”
I wonder if that holds true for what we do with blogs…
click here to read the whole thing.
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The point that resonated with me most is the question of “What is valued as knowledge, who decides, and who is valued as authority?“. This is the question I pose to my students in composition classes. When we read something, I ask who is this person? Why should we listen to him or her? When we look at the selection of essays in the textbook, I ask - who is represented here? who isn’t? why or why not? Why are all the essays taken from the Wall Street Journal? Who reads the WSJ? Who writes for the WSJ? Who doesn’t get heard from? What does that tell us about the bias? Compare the selection of essays in a chapter to the sources you might assemble for your own essay - it’s a conversation, it’s a party. Who are you going to invite to your party? Who will you let speak? So often freshman students begin only looking at the content of an essay and don’t consider the author to situate him or her. I push them to consider the author and the original intended audience, the location where the work was first published. These are at least as important as the content, I think.
Hmm — more to ponder. Thanks for the question.