What is Digital Media Literacy (DML)?
Also known as “New” Media Literacy, DML is the study of the development / acquisition of the skills needed to create and understand the multi-modal forms of communication that have arisen through the advent of digital technology.
Books by Jim Gee and Henry Jenkins--- pioneers in the fields of literacy and "New" media studies, respectively--- challenge traditional notions of learning and education in the digital age.
The linguist Jim Gee (currently at Arizona State University), for example, pushes researchers and educators to conceive of new media literacy NOT “first and foremost in terms of print”--- which would constitute traditional perspectives on literacy--- but rather, as specialized forms of communication intricately tied to contexts, social practices, and the groups of people that create them. (p. 17; Gee, J. P. 2007. Good video games + good learning: Collected essays on video games, learning, and literacy. New York, NY:Peter Lang.)
Traditional views of literacy have, both in theory and in practice, presented the view that a learner develops the ability to read and write through a step-by-step process of dis-connected, de-contextualized skills-building:Students learn to recognize letters, then phonemes, and then words, at which point literacy has been "achieved." Within this model, students are recipients of overt instruction, and success is measured against a standard that idealizes both the process and the skills being acquired.
In contrast, the view of literacy advocated here and elsewhere argues that forms of communication, including print, images, and any symbolic representations, cannot be disarticulated from social contexts and the practices of in-group members, who sanction such communication as legitimate and meaningful. Learners here are apprenticed into these practices by more experienced members, which gives the students both (1) "embodied" experience with the various modes of communication; and (2) "situated meanings" for the language itself (N.B. these terms are from Gee).
The use of the term "specialized language" is an attempt to delineate further the types of language-in-context a learner is likely to encounter. In the vein of Bakhtin, specialized language is the kind found in secondary, or non-primary, discourses-- e.g. jargon, lingos, argots, "technical" language. As individuals grow socially and intellectual, participation in groups outside of the immediate sphere of caregivers demands the acquisition of new linguistics skills. In the current discussion, the specialized language in question is that associated with digital technology, such as computers. To be more specific, the approaches to literacy discussed herein are concerned with a learner´s acquisition of "internet slang."
Some of the concerns of linguists and specialists surrounding literacy in the digital age are well-founded and quite important. For example, Dr. Maryanne Wolf, a professor of childhood development at Tufts University, asks, "Will the constructive component at the heart of reading begin to change and potentially atrophy as we shift to computer-presented text, in which massive amounts of information appear instantaneously? ...Or does the potential added information from hyperlinked text contribute to the development of children´s thinking? ... Should we begin to provide explicit instruction for reading multiple modalities of text presentation to ensure that our children learn multiple ways of processing?" (p. 16; Wolf, M. 2007. Proust and the Squid: The story and science of the reading brain. New York, NY. HarperCollins.)
In her book "Proust and the Squid," Maryanne Wolf explores the psychological/biological phenomenon of literacy with an eye on the historical development of literacy across cultures; at the same time, she raises important questions about the future of the literate brain in the digital age.
As Wolf´s poignant questions illustrate, language researchers are being confronted with a host of questions that generations of previous researchers could not have fully anticipated. Fortunately, a handful of contemporary researchers have begun shaping the parameters for future research.
According to Professor Henry Jenkins (formerly, Co-Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, currently at the University of Southern California), the DMLs in question are “a set of cultural competencies and social skills that young people [---arguably, young people are not the only ones implicated here! --DP] need in the new media landscape… These skills build on the foundation of traditional literacy, research skills, technical skills, and critical analysis skills taught in the classroom. The new skills include:
- Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
- Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
- Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
- Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
- Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details
- Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
- Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
- Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
- Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
- Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information
- Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms
(pg. 4; Jenkins, H., Purushotma, K., Robinson, A., & Weigel, M. 2006. Confronting the challenges of participation culture: Media education for the 21st century. Chicago, IL: The MacArthur Foundation. Available as a PDF document here. Those interested in seeing additional ways in which DML is being pursued might also be interested in reading Jenkins’s blog.)
Jenkins´s excellent overview of DML is both insightful and practical, and more important, it pushes the definition of what constitutes literacy for the modern student. Below, I offer my own contribution to this discussion by focusing on one particular aspect of literacy--- namely, that dealing with the psycholinguistic processes implicated as learners develop "specialized language" skills.
Consequently, this is the topic of my presentation at research I will take up at the 2010 TESOL conference, and the topic I recently presented to a group at Eric Klopfer's Education Arcade laboratory at MIT.
(The reader is encouraged to visit the links above to see some of the amazing things happening around Professor Klopfer. If video games are going to be taken seriously as educational tools, it is due in large part to the work of Professor Klopfer, to whom I remain grateful!!)
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TESOL Presentation: New Tools for New Areas of Inquiry
For any linguist or language teacher, today is an exciting time to be in the business: not only are there hundreds, if not thousands, of new directions for research related to digital technology (some of which are being pursued by well-established branches within the academic discipline, including Computer Assisted Language-Learning [CALL] and Machine Translation), but the linguistic sub-disciplines of sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics have also been refreshed by the publishing of ground-breaking research.
Above, I offered a brief introduction to the work of Jim Gee, who has propelled the field of sociolinguistics intro new and exciting areas. Most recently, his books on the educational capacities of video games have laid a path for what is perhaps the most fruitful and compelling line of research to appear in this field for decades; not surprisingly, dozens of research papers encompassing both first language literacy development and second language acquisition have put Gee´s research to good use (for a much more detailed account of this situation, including a list of references, please refer to my MA thesis, available as a PDF file by clicking here).
I do not hesitate to say that Dr. Ray Jackendoff´s "Foundations of Language," among his other recent publications, is the most important work ever published in the field of theoretical psycholinguistics; die-hard fans of Chomsky need only read his books to understand my claim.
In terms of contemporary psycholinguistic inquiry, a most amazing revolution is underway, and it is called the Parallel Architecture (PA). Dr. Ray Jackendoff, Tufts University Professor (Department of Philosophy), has been formalizing the PA over the course of thirty years and has arrived at a description of the human language capacity that, in my opinion, is more plausible and more complete than any other available model.
What is perhaps most remarkable about Jackendoff´s work is the fact that it addresses the psycho-cognitive aspects of language development without divorcing them from anthropological, social, biological, or evolutionary aspects. In doing so, the Professor takes a bold step away from what he has characterized as "Mainstream Generative Grammar"-- that is, the "syntactocentric" architectures of the tradition of generative linguistics that has dominated the discipline since Chomsky´s "Syntactic Structures" (1957)-- and, instead, offers a model that is not motivated to explain language development solely in terms of covert syntactic rules.
Those interested in pursuing the details of the PA are encouraged to refer directly to the works of Dr. Jackendoff (and his collaborators, including Steven Pinker and Peter Culicover), including the forthcoming "Meaning and the Lexicon: The Parallel Architecture 1975-2010", Oxford University Press, 2010. My understanding of the Parallel Architecture can be found in summary form in my MA thesis.
The most important thing to be taken from this miniscule introduction to the PA is that its formalism, as I argue here and elsewhere, makes it very well-suited to investigations into language development and literacy from a holistic standpoint-- that is to say, a standpoint that embraces both psycho- and socio-linguistic evidence.
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Theory in Action
I should start this section by admitting that a full-blown description of the potential of the Parallel Architecture for DML research is entirely impossible here. Simply put, there is really no tradition of research in this area--- no precedent to which I might refer as a means for summarizing or supporting my opinion. Nevertheless, I offer the analysis below as a means for "opening a conversation" about the Parallel Architecture, about Digital Media Literacy, about my opinions, and about everything stated in this posting.
It is my hope that anyone who has read up to this point will consider posting his or her own opinions, insights, questions, or arguments. I am particularly interested in hearing from those who would like to see this type of research take a more definitive shape, be it through a linguistic lens or through the lens of any other discipline, from computer science to psychology. At the same time, I beg the reader to accept the brevity of my illustration as an unfortunate consequence of a busy schedule, not as a sign of intellectual laziness. With all of these caveats, I will also state here that this illustration assumes the form of an "elevator pitch," taking the (unlikely) position that the reader is already familiar with psycholinguistics, the PA, and DML in general.
Spongebob has been known to make people laugh out loud. Among his victims are even the most unflappable, the most astute, the most awe-inspiring of intellectuals, including former U.S. President George W. Bush.
lol / laughing out loud: a linguistically holistic account of DML
Yet our psycholinguistic model begs us to investigate this theory further; it begs us to ask just what kind of information is being processed and stored in the learner´s memory. As I continue to argue, the Parallel Architecture provides the means for asking and answering these questions, and in doing so, brings us much closer to an understanding of language development.
Let´s start with a seven-year-old learner who is beginning to have meaningful interactions with digital media, for example, by visiting the internet homepage of her favorite animated television program, "Spongebob Square Pants." In this scenario, the child could be a native speaker of English, which is the language used on the homepage, or a non-native speaker who is learning English as another language. In both cases, we would like to make some basic assumptions:
- The learner is aware of this technology in general because older and/or more-experienced members of her social circle make use of it for a range of purposes.
- The learner is somewhere on a scale of proficiency with respect to her understanding of the manipulatable hardware, including a screen/monitor, keyboard, mouse, web-cam, etc; while she may not be a master, she is at least familiar with the equipment in question.
- The learner has a goal in mind; this goal may be to have fun, to learn, to socialize, or to accomplish any other goal--- even if she is not meta-cognitively conscious of these goals; by engaging with the technology in question, the learner creates the potential for her goal to be realized, hence, to have a meaningful interaction.
There are also assumptions to be made of a more linguistic nature:
The socio-linguistic-cognitive-cultural assumptions:
- The learner has achieved a level of fluency in the spoken vernacular language of her home community that allows her to function as a member of the group. This assumption, and the assumption directly below, are paramount in Gee´s model of literacy and of the socio-cognitive tradition in general; here, vernacular (primary) languages are developed before "specialized" (secondary) languages are developed.
- It is the learner´s collective experiences with those in her social sphere that shape her understanding of how to communicate using language, gestures, and other types of behaviors, which are intricately tied to the beliefs, opinions, and perspectives shared, to some degree, by community members; as her exposure to other ways of thinking, communicating, doing and being increases, she will find it necessary to acquire (linguistic) skills beyond the vernacular to make meaningful connections with members of sub-communities.
- The concepts of "embodied experience," "semiotic domains" and "situated meaning," which are alluded to above, find their home in the socio-cognitive traditions originating in the theories of Vygotsky, Bahktin, and most recently, Jim Gee.
- In her interaction with the digital media on the internet , the learner comes across not only print, but also a broad assortment of inter-dependent modalities, including images, animation, and sounds. The cohesive "text" presented to the learner is based on the inter-dependent quality of the modalities. Much of what she encounters as text is not fixed or static (like a printed book with texts and images) but rather, requires, responds to, or even changes, based on her reactions. Again, unlike most traditional books, the "stories" of digital media may differ each time they are "read."
- As described above, the ability of this leaner to acquire the "21st century" skills delineated by Jenkins and others are now part of what constitutes DML; for the child to be truly literate in this context-- for her to benefit from the pedagogical potential and unique affordances of digital media-- she will need to grow in many directions simultaneously.
- Finally, it has been argued in the work of Gee that literacy, by the definitions referred to throughout this post, is achieved by the learner when more competent peers "mentor" her into the appropriate ways of engaging with the technologies in question. Gee refers to this type of learning scenario as "cultural learning," distinguishable from the "biological learning" that leads to walking and (at least a large part of) talking, and also "instructed learning," which is used to teach people things like algebra.
The psycho-linguistic-cognitive assumptions:
- The learner´s vernacular language encompasses not only an impressive list of words and expressions (i.e., "interface rules" in the Parallel Architecture) stored in long-term memory, but grammatical, semantic/pragmatic, and phonological structures as well (i.e., also interface rules); this assumption is drawn from the psycholinguistic descriptions of language via Jackendoff´s PA, in which the lexicon is populated by various types of interface rules--- stored structures that make correspondences among the generative syntactic, phonological, and semantic/pragmatic components of the language faculty. Such structures may make (1) tri-component correspondences, as would be the case for many words, (2) bi-component correspondences (e.g., semantics/pragmatics + phonology + Ø) as in the case of some idiomatic expressions and formulaic utterances, or (3) intra-component correspondences, (e.g., syntax + Ø + Ø) as in the case of phrase structure rules (N.B. Think X-bar theory-DP).
- The learner´s exposure to words that are "high frequency" relative to others in the hypothetical corpus of available words will likely be noticed by a biological language acquisition capacity that is sensitive to statistics (in a way that is not entirely unlike neural network models of language development, but with some important differences, including the ability to makes new rules based on analogical relationships); grammatical types are also likely to correspond to predictable semantic categories in statistically significant way (e.g., prepositional phrases are used to denote locations and paths in three-dimensional space) such that the learner´s task of acquisition can be further assisted. Moreover, some interface rules can be marked with "contextual restrictions" in such a way that some words and grammatical structures anticipate the appearance of other words and grammatical structures; this is the case with the phenomena of collocations. All of these assumptions obtain but in different ways depending upon the context so that vernacular language and highly-specialized scientific language will, for example, have different "high-frequency" words. As Gee would argue, this is precisely why we want to say that no one learns a language "in general", or in the absence of a context.
- Language, through the lens of the PA, is absolutely influenced by such things as visual information, background knowledge, personal assumptions, etc. Processing, within this model, is promiscuous such that the following should be true: When a person hears the word "shot" in the sentence, "Before we quit trying fix this thing, let me take one more shot ," the absence of any contextual information would result in the all possible meanings of the word "shot" being sent to linguistic working memory; if, on the other hand, the speaker produced a bottle of liquor at the precise moment that the word "shot" was uttered, the language processor would settle on the appropriate meaning (This example comes from a real experience I had in an auto-mechanic shop in Somerville, Massachusetts!). If our young girl is confronted with multiple modalities in the pursuit of meaning-making on the Spongebob website, differences in the ways in which language is processed are sure to be found.
Here´s where I come in...
We can now imagine that during the course of her interacting with digital media, our learner will read a comment posted by a visitor to the site that includes the expression, "lol". Certainly, this language-unit is used all over the internet in a way that has resulted in it being fully understood by anyone who has achieved DML.
According to the socio-linguistic framework, our learner can be apprenticed into an understanding of "lol," namely that it is used to indicate that the speaker (or writer) finds something humorous. If the mentor is able to model the use of this unit appropriately, is able to answer the learner´s questions, or provides some kind of feedback as the leaner attempts to make use of this new expression, then, in theory, our learner will have successfully acquired it.
Yet our psycholinguistic model begs us to investigate this theory further; it begs us to ask just what kind of information is being processed and stored in the learner´s memory. As I continue to argue, the Parallel Architecture provides the means for asking and answering these questions, and in doing so, brings us much closer to an understanding of language development.
First, we want to know what type of interface rule "lol" is such that it can integrated into the learner´s lexicon. In its present form, I would argue that "lol" is a bi-component rule, containing phonological and semantic/pragmatic information, but arguably, no syntactic information (i.e., Is it an interjection, a sentence? Is it a verb, as in "I am lol-ing right now!"?). In the PA, the lexicon may be populated by thousands of other rules of this kind, and because meaning and sound are not "spelled out" by syntax (as in some renditions of language in the generative tradition), there is absolutely no reason why such a rule should be considered unusual.
At the same time, while it may not be difficult to approximate the semantic/pragmatic meaning (e.g., [~I am laughing]), it is unclear how the phonological information will be stored. Should the learner treat this unit as [el-oh-el], or as [law'l]. It is possible, at least in my understanding of the PA, that the stored unit in the lexicon may contain both phonological realizations, or, that each realization is attached to independent interface rules.
But even this account is not enough, I believe, to describe a learner who is truly literate in digital media. The reason, of course, is that most native speakers can relate "lol" to its phrasal equivalent, "laugh(ing) out loud." That is to say, for native speakers, we can assume a certain depth of understanding with regard to "lol" that is the result of a language processor that is remarkable in searching out relationships between data structures.
We may then consider the possibility that literate native speakers (experts) and learners (novices) may have dramatically different kinds of information stored for the "lol" entry: For the native speaker, it is possible that "lol" is simply marked as an orthographic variation of an already-acquired cliché--- that, upon first encountering "lol," the expert is able to simply manually modify or edit an existing interface rule.
Alternatively, as I have attempted to illustrate, the learner may or may not be privy to such information, and may therefore have an incomplete or inaccurate rule.
For the sake of argument, we can imagine that the exceptionally keen mentor is able to bring our learner to the type of understanding described above. If nothing else, at this point the reader may begin to see how a psycho-linguistic perspective on this topic would be of great importance to a mentor if he or she will be successful in helping our learner fully comprehend "lol" in all its forms and functions.
Yet, through the PA, we are able to take still a deeper look at this topic--- one in which the need for solid psycholinguistic theory becomes more obvious. This is the case when we accept that a native speaker also recognizes that "laugh(ing) out loud" is part of even greater paradigm that equates to a stored structure containing a typed-variable: VERB(ing)+out loud, as in THINK(ing) out loud, SING(ing) out loud, CRY(ing) out loud.
Interface rules of this sort are considered to be the product of a "sifting process" through which the language processor seeks to extrapolate possible "rules" from data. In simplified terms: By making note of the similarities between the expressions listed above, the language faculty is able to assign one or more variables to a phrase; once a variable has been assigned, it can be said that the rule has "gone productive," since new input that matches the paradigm will be integrated appropriately (e.g., Maybe, "TWEET(ing) out loud, for instance, would be recognized as part of the paradigm).
The question I have, and that I hope to answer through collaboration with those who I feel are truly experts in this field, is whether or not this latter type of mental activity can really be ascribed to cultural learning scenarios--- whether the learner can fully integrate the syntactic, phonological, and semantic/pragmatic data of LOL with recourse to cultural pedagogies alone. It is my opinion that the "typed variable interface rule" seems particularly tied to a "biological" operation that may not benefit at all from cultural learning. It is my belief that certain configurations of interface rules, such as the one described immediately above, are predictably either more prone or less prone to the socio-linguistic learning scenarios of Gee and others, which consequently means that other theories of learning are needed to produce an accurate model of DML specifically, and language development in general.
I believe the matter at hand is not simply an academic or intellectual exercise; rather, I am convinced that the products of future research will lead directly to the creation of better teaching methods and better language-learning technologies. In a society that will soon see first-graders "Google Wave-ing" on, say, the ecological problems raised by a talking sponge who lives in a pineapple, it would seem that linguists and educators will have to start working now to know what kinds of language problems are raised by young children who are using far more than words to share their ideas.
What do you think???
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News
- 2010 TESOL Conference
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I am really happy to announce that my proposal, titled, "For ESL Digital Media Literacy Research, a New Psycholinguistic Approach," has been accepted for the TESOL 2010 Convention program, held on March 24-27, 2010 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. I´ll be presenting my paper on 3/26/2010 at 1:00 PM in room 207 at the Boston Convention Center.
- Business Cards
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I have finally settled on a design or my business card and have created a printable version for anyone who is interested! interested! Simply click the thumbnail below:
- A New Look
- You may have noticed that I've changed the image on the top of my page. The old picture used to look like this:
Thanks to Ron "aka stones" Basile at akastones for creating this drawing. Let me know what you think by sending me
an email!
- TechESL(Blog)
- I've never been at a loss for words...so I started a web-log (a blog)! Introducing TechESL, a weekly blog with a focus on technology and learning English as a Second Language. Hope you enjoy reading it!
- Master´s Thesis
- Read my recently-published thesis, “The Parallel
Architecture For First Language Literacy Development and Second Language
Acquisition Studies: Prospective Theories and Applications” at the Healey
Library at UMass Boston or by opening the Adobe® PDF file below:
