Network Literacy

Contents 1 Outline 2 what 3 why 4 how 5 artefacts 6 list of related readings

Outline

(put in quote about literacy from Miller's rhythm science)

This describes the use of network literacies within the curriculum and the manner and extent to which these are embedded within theory and practice in the media program.

The simplest way to think of network literacy is as the practice of making, doing, and being within networked ecologies. It is what happens when the network is not only the site of distribution but also the place of practice. While this is a very large field or set of problems, it has generally been constrained to some that are of particular relevance to media students.

what

Network literacy refers to the set of practices that enable, facilitate, and allow the use of networked technologies. The easiest way to understand it is to think of print literacy and then apply the same model to our use of the network.

Print (or traditional) literacy is the ability to read and write. It means I can write not only an essay, but also all those other minor things that writing enables. A shopping list, a love letter, a poem, a song, a note to myself or my mother. Reading means not only access to literature but also the television guide, the train timetable, and to read that love letter that I've been sent. But to be literate in these means to participate in these technologies (for writing is plainly a technology) where I know that I can write on a variety of surfaces, using a variety of implements. It means I also know that there are lots of surfaces that won't work for writing, for example I'm not going to write on the window with my fountain pen (though I might with my white board marker).

Print literacy also includes the deep hegemony of print and the page as cultural norms. So that when I pick up a book I know that there are objects called books, that they have particular structures, are arranged serially, will have page numbers to aid locating things and to indicate where I am in the book, will have an author/s, a title, can be found in libraries, have indexes and/or table of contents and so on. I know I don't need to read the text across the top or bottom of each page, that the title page has a particular function and that it is bound, has a spine, and that there are social protocols attached (generally silent reading, if it is from a library it is shared so I cannot mark it, and need to return it after a set time) and so on. This is print literacy.

Network literacy then is to understand how to read and write online, in a variety of contexts. It also means knowing how to contribute content, share, borrow and reuse this content. It means knowing how to write with text, image, sound and video and their possible combinations. It requires some knowledge of the role of linking - of connecting small parts together into larger groups of relations, and so it is premised on the ability to participate in these spaces socially, technically, critically and creatively, where participation means contributing, using, and remaking.

It means knowing that these things can be remixed, that I can take parts from different places and aggregate them, and that things like RSS exist which help to loosely bind things together. It includes some awareness of the variety of social protocols around these different services and activities, that a chat room is different to email, to your participation in a WoW guild or in Second Life. That a blog has a particular multivocal tone and how to write within this plural, carnivalesque and deeply intertwined environment. These literacies are not only technical or technological, but as with print are social, technical, critical and creative.

why

Well, I think it's obvious but here goes. Just as the development of print literacy (the set of practices that includes reading and writing with the book in all its forms and genres as perhaps its most important artefact) produced enormous cultural changes so too is the internet. With the rise of print reading and writing moved from the domain of the specialised to a broader population, the novel was invented, vernaculars appeared in print, and knowledge could now be externalised, referred to, and shared. Entire institutions and practices developed as a specific consequence (and/or cause), including printing, the modern library, classificatory systems, pagination, abstract thought, footnoting and referencing conventions, and so on. These are deeply embedded and largely invisible to us, and are at the very foundation of academic and critical practice.

So, with the development of the internet we are seeing a post literate set of practices arise. These include a variety of technical competencies about how to do various things - exchange files, find files, install them - which are no more complex or odd than what we might do to find and obtain an obscure journal article. They also require a variety of social protocols, how we write email, chat in IRC, blog, hang out in a MOO or Second Life, video conference, role play, and so on all have conventions, many of which are still being defined. And they require technical and critical practices which include video, audio, text, still image. On their own and in combination. Distributed across emerging web 2.0 services and inside of your own networked practice. This set of practices, their social, technical and cultural facets, constitutes network literacy. For any budding media practitioner they are to your practice and profession what the book, pen, and paper was to literary writing.

Any media practitioner working today will rely upon the network in a fundamental way. This is from obvious things like doing internet research and using email through to disseminating a variety of material online as part of your professional practice. The extent of this is now enormous, though many of our students remain nonplussed when they begin a media degree only to find themselves surrounded by computers and the internet!

A SCENARIO AS AN ASIDE

I am often asked "why do we have to do this stuff I'm not interested in doing computer stuff?". My simplest answer is pretty much to suggest that media is perhaps not their likely career then, as it is pretty difficult to find any aspect of media (production, management, administration) that is not going to rely on computers in some pretty basic ways. However, the more interesting conversation is usually followed by something like "because my ideal job is to work for a small literary publisher". To which my reply goes along the lines of (and yes, I do get on a hobby horse) "and so your small literary publisher would not have a web site, which would contain your back catalogue, available as print on demand, nor would you encourage your writers to blog to help promote their work, and you wouldn't have podcasts of your writer's interviews and conversations at the various literary festivals they participated in on the website either" and so on. At this point the students usually begin to see that what we are teaching is not 'web authoring 101' but network literacy and that of course doing each of these things would make very good sense for a literary publisher.

However, not only will the network be integral to how we work, it has enormous implications to what constitutes media practice (these changes are already happening). The simple, traditional, and industrial distinction between professional and amateur media production and distribution, largely only derived from scarce access to broadcast media (therefore professional) is dissolving which will affect professional media practice. If anyone can establish a video channel via a video hosting service and RSS then what counts as media practice changes. Finally, as the network becomes more ingrained into our practice we can expect further changes to media forms as video, audio and program content becomes more granular and porous to other parts of the network - just as a blog is a loose writing system that allows for its parts to be easily connected to other parts, media formats will similarly change to accommodate this. In such a scenario media literacy shifts from simply knowing how to use the web to knowing how to work in the web as your primary 'studio' or place of practice.

how

Network literacy is informally structured across several subjects within the media program. It probably begins in semester one in a subject such as Editing Media Texts which is computer based. Here students are introduced to very basic things about their student accounts, including use of email, server space, how to access this on and off campus, and some basic protocols for saving and backing up work. While most students think they are quite literate about this, a simple exercise of creating a new document (in Word for example) and then saving it to a specific location on a computer which involves the creation of several folders nested inside of each other, and then creating a copy of this at the OS level, and then putting all of this into a specific folder on the server, leaves most of the students lost. In addition throughout Editing Media Texts students are learning about moving media between workstations, desktops and servers, as well as to and from home.

In semester two Networked Media is a key site for more embedding of network literacy. Here students write a basic hypertext, are introduced to blogs, upload video and audio to third party services to then embed in their blogs, and use third party photo hosting sites too. Hypertext is fundamental to network literacy, and complements their blogs, as hypertext is a highly granular form where small parts are expected to have multiple possibilities of connection to other small parts. This is one of the key concepts of the network so the hypertext exercise in Networked Media is able to use their print literacy and competency to rethink ideas about structure, form and linearity. This is very productive as they already know how to write, so the task does not require a new fundamental skill, which makes it much easier for them to concentrate on form.

Semester three and four requires all students to complete Integrated Media One and Two. (These subjects could have nearly been called anything, including post industrial media!) Integrated Media One generally concentrates on time based media online and introduces students to podcasting, embedding video and audio, and some experiments in interactive video. Most of this work is blog based, and grows out of the skills introduced in Networked Media. Integrated Media Two had historically concentrated on the critical and applied use of social media, and the rise of social media as a key paradigm of generation 2 Web practices. However, it is currently (2008) concentrating on Second Life and is using Second Life as the basis for a machinima project.

Semesters five and six have little that is formally orientated towards network literacy. However, the aim is that students, by their final year, will have sufficient tools and skills to be able to use, discover, and adapt a variety of technologies and practices as they require. In practice this is mixed, however students routinely establish email lists, group blogs, wikis, and utilise interactive QuickTime to present work. Their blogs commonly remain a key site of documentation, dissemination and exchange and they think nothing of presenting work in progress in this way. While students may complain about the ongoing use of their blogs in third year it is useful to remember the extent to which they take for granted their ability to distribute and publish their work online in their final year.

artefacts

Blogs are the primary, and exemplary, media object that we use with students to develop, nurture, model and create network literacy. They are used as the locus for reflective and process based activiites, as an informal, personal and self defined networked portfolio and as a practice that is deeply intertwingled with what the network is, or at least ought to be.

list of related readings

Brabazon, T (2002), Digital Hemlock: Digital Education and the Poisoning of Teaching, UNSW Press: Sydney, p.61, pp.66-68, p.111

Buckingham, D (2003), Media Education: Literacy, Learning and Contemporary Culture, Polity Press: Cambridge, pp.173-188 (digital literacy).

Butcher, C, Davies, C & Highton, M (2006), Designing Learning: From Module Outline to Effective Teaching, Routledge: London, pp.85-86 (criteria for evaluating internet resources)

Kist, W (2005), New Literacies in Action: Teaching and Learning in Multiple Media, Teachers College Press: New York.

Klobas, J (2006), Wikis: Tools for Information Work and Collaboration, Chandos Publishing: Oxford, pp.38-43 (criteria for assessing information content, online resources & wikis)

Miles, Adrian. "Network Literacy: The New Path to Knowledge." Screen Education Autumn.45 (2007): 24-30.

Richardson, W (2006), Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts: and other powerful web tools for classrooms, Corwin Press: Thousand Oaks, pp.28

Tyner, K (1998), Literacy in a Digital World: Teaching and Learning in the Age of Information, Lawrence Erlbaum: Mahwah, NJ.