Review of Lankshear & Knoble’s “New Literacies Sampler: New literacies and digital epistemologies” (2007). Chapter 1.

Summary
The new ways of thinking are nothing short of epochal, say the authors of the book “A New Literacies Sampler“. A shift of paradigm into “post-industrial thinking” is slamming into the industrial mindset of the old guard, and the new information warriors are armed with cutting edge technologies in communication and information sharing. We are witnessing the end-of-days of the “sage on the stage”, the “expert” opinion, and information as a commodity. “Open source epistemology” may provide us with new ways of creating information in the modern age. The new paradigm builds on the ideas of distributed expertise and decentralize authorship.

New Literacies are emerging along with new nuanced and evolving definitions of what literacy even means. Beyond reading and writing, encoding and decoding meaning, and context of information, the new 21st Century Literacy Skills also delineate between the content, the mode of communication, and the “ethos” underpinning the communication itself. In other words, new literacy skills involve not only the technology that creates the “text” (which now includes words, visual images, video, music, animation, in addition to the practices of blogging, podcasting, meme-ing, vodcasting, gaming, remixing, digital annotation, et cetera, along with the traditional forms of literacy) but key to this is also the level of participation and discourse it affords the larger audience. The idea here is that information is only as valuable as it’s level of shareability and utility. The New Literacies move beyond creating artifacts that can be owned and shared to mobilizing an entirely new and different set of values, priorities and sensibilities.

Perspective
If you follow my work you know I hold the concept of decentralization in high regard. My distaste for hierarchy, hegemony and rampant monetization should be fairly obvious by now, or should be as my work continues. Ideas of innovation, experimentation, distributive and emergent systems of knowledge and collaboration are all concepts I revisit often. So, allow me to preface my following commentary on the fact that I will be embracing the ethos driving the New Literacies, if for no other reason than it is the future. However, my contrarian nature also compels me to make a few points for consideration, if only to propel a robust discourse surrounding these ideas.

For The LOLs
I love the idea that, it is vital to view technology not just a new way to do what we have always done, but as a new way. However, I had to laugh at the irony as I tried five different ways to pull up the text in an annotation platform on my ipad. (I find I need the freedom to walk around, go outside, and multitask as I work.) So instead of completing the reading in Hypothes.is for the full experience of online group annotation, I ended up importing the text into Evernote, using the drawing pen to highlight. Score: Zero for collaborative learning: Five for utilizing new technologies (at least I didn’t print it out and highlight it to put in a three-ring binder.)

However beyond this limitation in technology, which I am sure is temporary, there is another idea here that vexes me. Throughout my master degree program I have pushed back on the practice of relying exclusively on peer assessment of the work as a replacement to direct feedback from the professor, the “expert” in this case. In many cases it has felt like the blind leading the blind and often the feedback I’ve received has been based on personal experiences rather than a background of rigorous research or expertise. That said, please disregard this if you happen to be one of my luminary peer-reviewers for this article 🙂

The Vexing Rub
Two central issues come to mind as I ruminate on the idea of collaborative learning. First, I am not convinced that consensus reality or group think is always the best gauge by which to assess ideas. This is for a few reasons. First, critical thinking skills are in short supply in modern culture. This particular skill was taken out of mainstream educational curriculum three to four generations ago in public schools. Most people at this point are unable to identify fallacious arguments and easily fall for even the most basic rhetorical fallacies such as deference to majority, the straw man, the red herring, and the slippery slope, for example. The reason is because without the skills of critical thinking it is hard to distinguish between arguments that are sound and ones that are true. For example, it could be based on sound reasoning to believe the sun rises because the rooster crows, but it does not make it true. Or, to take a more current example, the flat earth theories flooding the internet. They sound pretty convincing. But often there are more hidden forces at work behind what we observe through experience. Given the state of our modern educational system and the fact that fewer than 10% (of the U.S. and even less of the global) population go on to pursue the rigor of graduate level studies, I remain skeptical of consensus reality.

Which leads me to my second thought. We should not underestimate the ability of the global hegemony to dominate an open discourse. Their resources are vast and when they have certain things at stake, they play dirty. It would be conceivable and easy to imagine how legions of hired trolls and even AI programs, at this point indistinguishable from humans, could control an open discourse. I would love to believe in “trust through the power of limitless participation” as it is phrased in the book. But I am unsure that even a million people actively participating on a given topic could contend with a handful of motivated individuals armed with a data center the size of the Camp Williams LEED silver facility in Utah. The general population would need to be educated and savvy to the techniques employed in modern information warfare if discussing anything with disruptive potential.

That Said…
I will continue to support the ideals as put forward in the “New Literacies”. There is immense value in the direction they will take us in the coming years, but I think a cautious approach is warranted. It would be naive, I think, to believe that all who participate in information and knowledge creation will engage with the same high-minded, altruistic values and rules of engagement.