Technoliteracy

In a speech I gave yesterday to the University of Chester's final year teacher trainees, I touched on the concept of multi-literacy. This was in response to a question from a student about the potential dumbing down of language through SMS texting. She was concerned that txting was encouraging bad spelling which might adversely affect students' academic work. Referred to variously as 'squeeze text', txting, vernacular orthography or unregimented writing (Shortis, 2009), this kind of unorthodox spelling first emerged as a result of the 160 character limit on any single text message. The result is abbreviated spellings, emoticons and phonological representations of orthodox spellings, many of which have become a part of txting culture. The question thrown at me was about the potential problem of squeeze txt spellings appearing in assessed essays and other formal documents. I can see how it could become a problem. Students in my own programmes occasionally make phonological spelling errors. 'I could of...' is a regular mistake I see in the essays I mark. People are beginning to spell as they speak. But is this a problem, if they know what contexts to use these unorthodox spellings within and which to avoid? In 2008 David Crystal related the story of a young student who wrote an entire essay in squeeze text. One of the extracts went something like this:

My smmr hols wr CWOT. B4, we used 2go 2 NY 2C my bro, his GF + thr 3 :-@ kids FTF. ILNY, it's a gr8 plc.

Crystal notes that the complete essay was never tracked down, leading to a fair assumption that the entire story was merely a hoax, and possibly an attempt to sensationalise the issue for the popular press. Regardless of its accuracy or provenance, the press had a field day, and a storm of protests ensued. Crystal, an acknowledged world expert on language was less impressed, and suggested that regardless of the strange appearance (or morphology) or the words, they never the less followed orthodox grammatical structure. He  wryly suggested that for sheer creativity, he would have awarded the student 10 out of 10, but for appropriateness, 0 out of 10.

Crystal and other make the point that language is evolving and new words are appearing all the time in the English language (in all its many forms worldwide), because language is organic and the culture it emerges from is constantly adapting to change, as are the meanings of some words. Is the controversy of squeeze text really as serious an issue as people are making it out to be? Or is there more than a hint of hyperbole and hysteria about the 'dumbing down' of the English language?

My view is that today's students are able to adapt to all the various media they use to communicate. In being habituated into a particular medium, the user assimilates the culture of that particular tool and begins to communicate appropriately within it. In many ways this is akin to living and working in a foreign country, where to survive and not stand out like a sore thumb, one learns to adopt the practices and social mores of the host country in parallel to learning the new language. This transcends skill and becomes a literacy. My theory is that students generally know the difference between communicating in SMS and writing a formal essay, and will usually follow the rules.

How many media do today's students use in regular communication? SMS, telephone voice, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, written language... the list is quite long, and they certainly use more modes of communication than those that were available to me when I went to university. It therefore follows that they need to learn more forms of literacy than I had to when I was in full time study. For Shortis (2009) the term technoliteracy is used to describe how adept a user is in communicating through any given device. For example, SMS texting requires a specific kind of technoliteracy, where the user has to be familiar with a number of features and affordances, including the capabilities (and error issues) of predictive text mode, the 160 character limitation per single text, and the multi function feature of the standard keys on the keypad. They will also need to be aware of the many regularly used abbreviations, some of which transgress into other modes such as Facebook and e-mail. My 85 year old father recently started using Facebook and soon sent a message including the phrase LOL. To most people using SMS or Facebook LOL stands for Laughing Out Loud. To him, it meant Lots Of Love. Heaven knows what he thinks WTF stands for... Welcome To Facebook perhaps? Whichever stance you adopt in the Gr8 Db8 - one thing is clear. We all need a good dose of technoliteracy.

References

Crystal, D. (2008) Txting: The gr8 db8. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shortis, T. (2009) Revoicing Txt. In S. Wheeler (Ed.) Connected Minds, Emerging Cultures: Cybercultures in Online Learning. Charlotte, NC: Information Age.


Technoliteracy by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

A moving experience

Whilst reading David Crystal's book 'Txting: the gr8 db8' yesterday, I came across the txting expression 'a3' which apparently means 'anytime, anywhere, anyplace'. It sounds like the strapline for a glitzy advert from the 1980s for Martini - 'anytime, anyplace, anywhere, there's a wonderful world you can share'. In other words, you can totally get off your face anywhere and at anytime, so just go for it. Whilst the glamourisation of hard liquor and drunkenness is not something I'm likely to espouse (No, really? - Ed), I can appreciate the sentiments of the 'a3' notion when it comes to learning. In particular, technology mediated learning has never been so 'a3' as it is right now. Smart mobile technology, touch screens, context aware systems and fast access to the Internet are just a few of the features that are drawing us ever closer to the holy grail of ubiquitous learning (u-learning).

But why on earth do we need a3 learning? Is it because we are all so busy that learning has to occur on the move, or in shifting contexts? Is it due to our increasingly nomadic lifestyles? Is it perhaps because learning informally is becoming more and more vital in our everyday lives, and must become more achievable beyond the bounds of the traditional institution? I believe it is all of these ... the context of learning is changing because our lifestyles are changing.

Several years ago I adapted the work of the late Professor Dan Coldeway (I had the pleasure to meet him on one solitary occasion when I was invited to speak at his university in South Dakota in 2002). Dan's quadrant model of 'same time, different place' contexts was quite simple, but very useful in visualising all the possible combinations of locations and times in which learning could take place. I mapped a variety of tools and technologies over this model, and it allowed me some thinking space to help me to see all of the possibilities of technology mediated learning. I called it the martini model. That was over a decade ago. Time has moved on and so has the technology. And so, I might add, have our expectations. We now carry extremly powerful little devices in our pockets which we can use to access information, communicate and discover, while on the move. Although a3 learning is not fully with us yet, due to constraints in bandwidth, patchy provision, variable cost and some human factors, it is on its way, and it won't be long, I predict, before students will be able to experience seamless, transparent learning that does not vary in quality, wherever they are, and at whatever time of the day or night. It shouldn't matter where we are or what the time it. We should be able to access the same resources wherever and whenever we are. Equivalent experiences should produce equivalent outcomes. Think I'm wrong? I'm waiting for your comments...

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Scotching the myth

Just about every new technology that has been introduced has been criticised for its potential to corrupt, dumb-down or otherwise undermine society. A recent speech by the Open University's Martin Bean highlighted the fact that from the slateboard to the Internet, the doomsayers have been warning us that we are at risk and that innovation is to be feared and new technologies avoided.

Reading the recent interview of the celebrated language scholar David Crystal reveals that there is a tension between the expectations people place on the use of new technologies and their actual use. Crystal dashes the myth that young people's literacy skills (and in particular their ability to spell correctly) are being weakened by texting through SMS on mobile phones. It is true, he says, that there is some abbreviation used in texting, twittering and other forms of messaging where space is limited (in his new book entitled the Gr8 Deb8 he acknowledges this phenomenon). But this type of txting, he argues, is a pragmatic and context specific ploy rather than a sea-change in the way people are writing. He goes on to expose the hoax essay in which a student was purported to have written a holiday account completely in txt-speak. 'Squeeze text' has its place, is the message, but it won't damage our ability to communicate in more traditional ways. We have always had abbreviated versions of text says Crystal:

"And so the point to make to adults who are criticizing the situation is to say, "You actually did precisely the same thing when you were a kid, except of course you didn't have a mobile phone to do it on." There's the old example, "YY UR YY UB IC UR YY 4ME" ["Too wise you are, too wise you be, I see you are too wise for me"]. As soon as you mention it, adults will say, "Oh yes, of course," and it gives them a bit of a shock to realize that in fact most of the abbreviations aren't new at all."

Alistair Creelman's summary of the interview is particularly useful:

"Teenagers, argues Crystal, are able to cope easily with different registers of language and realize clearly when texting language is appropriate. Interviews with many teenagers reveal that they can't believe how anyone would use texting abbreviations in school work. It simply doesn't belong there and they all realise that. In addition, by analysing large amounts of text messages Crystal found that only around 10% of words were abbreviated at all, thereby deflating the whole debate."

According to Crystal, txting is not going to end the world as we know it, and the tower of literacy is not going to come crashing down around our ears. My view is that children use new technologies to find new ways to communicate. They don't lose the ability to communicate in more traditional ways. They simply find new ways, and in effect, some are actually more adept at communicating than their parents, because they have so many more channels at their disposal. So teachers and parents can now rest easy and worry about other things. Now all we have to do is stamp out the grocer's apostrophe...

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