There is a great deal of talk, and in some cases anxiety, about how the New and Converging Technologies (NCT) will impact the classroom. We need to remind ourselves that we are still in the 'bedazzled' phase of NCT. Television is 60 years old this year and the debates still rage on: is it destroying literacy? does it encourage violent behaviour? has it replaced parents? has it replaced teachers? etc. NCT are less than five (arguably three) years old as a popular medium, so we needn't rush to judgment -- but we must begin. A key strategy to achieving understanding is to become users of, participants in, the NCT. It is best to clarify what is meant by New and Converging Technologies before going any further. Implicit in this label are multi-media computers capable of presenting text, picture, sound and movement (as video) simultaneously. The origins of these messages are CDs, hard drives and networks, where the computers transmit and receive multi-media messages. The World Wide Web (WWW) is a multi-media environment where these messages are the stock in trade. It is easy to become confused by all this, because it is at once familiar and unfamiliar. Text and graphics have been with us for centuries, radio and television for decades, but these have been given separate media channels and discourses. When separate, we recognize them easily and deconstruct them using the tools developed by media scholars over the last 40 years. When we see and hear them all on the same screen, however, it is a shock. They have converged, and their grammars are conflated. Does one medium dominate? How do they inflect each other's meanings? When we begin to create using multi-media tools we are shocked but delighted at the complexity and range of expression possible. How will we teach this? Where do we begin? What tools of media analysis and deconstruction still serve and which need adaptation?
Operating systems in computers facilitate and regulate information processing, storage, retrieval and display. So too do languages in society. Language and cultural practices can be seen as societies' operating systems. Language is not just a way to communicate, but a way of thinking. The extent to which NCT and the networking they imply modify language is the extent to which they modify our operating systems, and therefore the ways teachers must adapt their practices. Schools have definite operating systems. Many classrooms are still following the literate (print-dominated) operating systems of their original design. These classrooms use the linear, close-analysis, individualized approach to curricular delivery. They will evolve into operating systems that accommodate orality (an oral way of thinking as well as communicating), which practices a non-linear, gestalt, collective approach to curriculum. These are attributes of the operating systems of the NCT and of the student minds that have been moulded by electronic communications.
Language is a way of accessing, communicating and learning (processing) information. Language controls how we think as much as how we communicate. The bias of each language changes the ways in which we process information, or learn, whether it be inflected (Chinese) or gendered (French). Computers inflect, if not re-invent, language processes, and therefore thinking processes. The print portion of computer use influences literate thinking, but the electronic medium resurrects the pre-print oral tradition. The combining of these two very different languages, whether a dialectic or a happy hybrid, will be a fascinating process.
There are two main iterations of Media teaching: as a language system and as cultural studies. NCT impact on both of these iterations. When media teaching focusses on the language of the media, or media production, students can become consumed by the techniques and grammar, ignoring values messages. Because NCT is a relatively new medium and a multi-medium, it may be easier to lose sight of the cultural values (the bedazzlement factor). Teachers will have to work even harder to help students maintain a balanced perspective. When media teaching focuses on cultural studies, audience interpretation and representation dominate. Because there is a massive amount of information from other cultures presented from a variety of points of view, expecially via the WWW, cultural studies may be easier than ever to address. One of media education's greatest contributions to education as a whole is its multiple-perspective approach to analysis. This multiple perspective is implicit in the networking aspect of NCT because there are often multiple versions of texts or web sites -- an open invitation for teachers to consider issues of free speech, bias, representation and authenticity.
On the other hand, students need to be reminded that the WWW is NOT the world, but the younger, middle-class, wired, mostly English-writing portion of the world. The bulk and international flavour of the WWW makes it easy to believe otherwise, but two-thirds of the world's population have never made a phone call. From the point of view of the NCT, these people are disenfranchised.
The emerging NCT cause us to redefine literacy, so curriculum is and will be under constant pressure to evolve.
The first to undergo redefinition is 'interactivity'. For the most part, classroom texts have remained fixed, as printed texts, images, music or video. Interactivity had mainly to do with seminar-style discussion and producing a response. With NCT, interactivity takes on a deeper meaning. Electronic communications can be edited in terms of their sequence and duration -- the user controls the delivery. In many cases, the texts can be responded to, even interrogated, on the spot, with feedback going back to the creator, not just the teacher or classmates.
A second evolution involves the content of the curriculum. Media teachers already include significant portions of popular culture in their classrooms. These texts are most often from known sources, such as Cable in the Classroom, libraries, rentals or the popular press. With NCT, the licence to publish is easier to achieve. A far greater range of texts from disparate sources is available, providing teachers with wonderful opportunities to discuss authenticity, dissenting points of view, and how to choose messages that will most benefit learning. In his book Playing the Future, Douglas Rushkoff describes students constructing their own texts while grazing and zapping television signals. Surfing the Web is exactly this process, where the surfers construct their own journeys using sequence and duration. Opportunities arise here for discussing the vocabulary of searching, surfing, evaluating sites, and processing retrieved information.
Another concern for teachers is the human factor, especially the relative comfort children feel with technology and the occasional, if not frequent, discomfort of their elders. New technologies are often readily taken up and used uncritically by the young, and the technologies are often attacked by adults who are more uncomfortable with the new values they may contain than with the technologies themselves. Teachers must work to remain neutral about the technologies, helping students achieve their own evaluations and practices.
A simple dictum is useful here: let the students teach. Acknowledging their expertise and authority will not only be honest, but will encourage them to assess what they know and feel about the technologies as they instruct the teacher. Media and NCT teaching is the perfect venue for co-learning.
The graphical aspect of print communications will be enhanced, which will force increased curricular integration (visual language combined with written language). Increased pressure to integrate will challenge the departmental structure of secondary education (again an iteration of the 19th Century Industrial Age model).
The dominance of long narrative (novels and plays) in the curriculum will be challenged by the need to learn short expository and descriptive communications (reports, letters and memos). The ephemeral nature of screen messages discourages the close analysis often used in English classrooms and will force students to move to a more gestalt, overview position. There will be a greater pressure to examine the receiver and the text because the meaning is mostly in the audience and the context it provides.
NCT will inevitably be accompanied by converging curricula. Already, many different courses are laying claim to the same NCT genres, e.g. desktop and web page publishing. Just as businesses and business jobs have converged and telescoped, so too will courses, departments and teaching roles.
The NCT do not really distinguish between picture, sound, motion, and print. These are all elements of the messages, used as paints from a palette. They blend and interact to produce meaning.
Some elements come from print, which contains a bias towards separation, analysis, individualization. and linearity. Others come from an oral tradition, which contains a bias towards integration, feeling, community and gestalt.
These two biases intersect in e-mail (asynchronous), and especially chat lines (real-time), which are very popular among youth. Chats communicate through print, but without the usual permanence, conventions of grammar, sentences or even spelling. Messages are scanned quickly, responded to with little reflection, and then forgotten, like the casual conversations they build. The opportunities for media teachers will be in investigating the evolutions that this hybrid medium will cause in writing. Will writing become more like speech in its structures and tone? Will speech become more literate? 93% of oral communication is body language and tonal cues (de Kerckhove, 107); what happens to conversation when that 93% is removed by the text of the computer screen? Will we invent new punctuations?
Marshall McLuhan, Kathryn Hutchon and Eric McLuhan wrote City as Classroom (Book Society of Canada) in 1977, a book that has inspired many media teachers to include the community as part of their classrooms. With the NCT, and especially the WWW, the wired world can now be included as part of the classroom. The nature and evaluation of virtual experiences will become another fertile opportunity for the media teacher.
With the inclusion of the content of the NCT into the media classroom, the notion of the canon will expand, or maybe explode. Essential texts will not be determined by the keepers of the book, but by communities of students and teachers negotiating which texts are important for their lives, their communities, their history. The canon will vary according to region, and will evolve rapidly. The notion of the canon could become one of the most exciting units of study in the media classroom, where texts are examined, put on trial, and accepted or rejected by consensus. Whether texts are included or excluded will not matter so much as how they are interrogated.
The meaning of community will also evolve. Networks abolish space, allowing students with common interests to find and interact with each other. A student with an unusual interest need no longer learn alone, but can locate people with common interests and learn communally. A teacher who helps students understand and appreciate the operating systems of differing communities, real and virtual, can provide invaluable education for students who will live in NCT environments.
In the Industrial Age, the classroom was sanctified space, where texts and topics of study could be controlled for the protection of students and the comfort of the teacher. World as Classroom means that many contentious topics will now be fair game for study. Middle Eastern politics, health issues, advertising, hate groups and family values will be part of the curriculum. A basic precept of media education, 'Education not Evasion,' will help students make more genuine sense of their world. These changes will bring an inevitable challenge to censorship, which will also have to be negotiated with the educational bureaucracy. Censoring the Net is not only unrealistic, but will damage one of its major strengths -- freedom of speech, warts and all. The Information Age precludes that access will be more universal, and media education is never more crucial.
The frameworks in current use in media classrooms will help students make sense of NCT messages. Media Education de-naturalizes texts, which can help students become more conscious of constructions and layers of meaning. Media Education's inclusion of marketing concepts (demographics and psychographics) can also help them to see their position in the marketplaces of ideas and culture. Students can come to appreciate multiple POV from Media Education. This awareness will be essential for them to deal with the multiplicity of official and unofficial versions of events and concepts they will encounter through the NCT. Media Education's inclusion of non-standard texts in its canon will help students to understand and appreciate the role of multiple communications in the constructions of their world view. Media Education's ability to adapt to new popular culture forms and texts will help students acknowledge the validity and appreciate the value of the flow of NCT messages.
Media Education's emphasis on information processing skills rather than information content will help teachers meet the challenges of evaluation and standardization. The content may change from course to course, but the application of skills will remain relatively stable. Media Education's abilities to provide students with frameworks for understanding multiple perspectives, with the abilities to perceive and evaluate multiple-layered messages and to interact with these messages are essential needs in the classroom.
Students who do not understand how the NCT work, how they construct meaning, how they can be used, and how the evidence they present can be weighed and evaluated are, in contemporary cultures, considerably disadvantaged and disempowered (Abbott & Masterman 1997). What can be more crucial in the Information Age than information processing skills? What can be more crucial for the media teacher than to help students refine these skills? Just as the family, business and government have evolved with changing times, so too must education question, renew and implement curriculum. The NCT provide us with new challenges and new opportunities. The media classroom has always been the most important learning environment for students in The Information Age, and the NCT will ensure that it remains so.
de Kerckhove, Derrick The Skin of Culture, Somerville House, 1995
Logan, Robert, The Fifth Language, Stoddart, 1995
Abbott & Masterman, Working Paper No. 2, Centre for Literacy, 1997
Castells, Manuel, The Rise of the Network Society, Blackwell 1996