I like this description of his film:
[snip]
Dodo birds are famous for two things: being dumb and being dead. So when Randy Olson calls fellow biologists “dodos” in his new documentary “Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus,” it's not meant as a compliment.
Dodos were flightless, odd-looking birds discovered by Portuguese sailors in the early 1500s on a tiny island in the Indian Ocean, just east of Madagascar. The birds were named after the Portuguese word for “fool” because they were fearless of humans and would walk up to hungry hunters who simply clubbed them to death and ate them. The birds were extinct by the 17th century, less than 200 years after their discovery.Olson…thinks the dodo's fate is a good metaphor for biologists in today's changing media environment. “Natural selection teaches us that as an environment changes, species that can change with the environment will survive, while those that fail to change run the risk of extinction,” Olson said in a telephone interview. “Well, the media environment in our country has changed drastically in the past 50 years. Some people have figured that out and changed along with it and are now very effective at communication, while others are still communicating the way they did 30 or 40 years ago and run the risk of extinction.”
Getting to Olson’s main point:
[more snips]
As a marine ecologist with more than 20 years of research experience, Olson ultimately sides with evolution and concludes that intelligent design is at best an idea stalled at the intuition stage.
“There isn't much to intelligent design,” Olson told LiveScience. “These guys have this really deep-seated intuition that they can look at nature and see a designer at work, but the problem is they've failed to advance it to any kind of science so far.”
Despite Olson's dismissal of intelligent design in his film, scientists come off looking even worse. During interviews, evolutionists appear stiff, condescending, inarticulate and arrogant.
Olson fears the elitism he sees among his colleagues could turn the public off to science. But it's not too late to change, he says.
To start, Olson thinks scientists should practice being concise and punchier, as opposed to long-winded and exhaustingly thorough, when talking about their work.
“It's like in mathematics when dummies present the proof of a formula in a hundred steps and the genius does the same thing in five,” Olson said. ”It's the exact same process [in science communication]. The dummy takes 12 pages to explain what everybody needs to know, while the great communicator does it in a page and a half.”
The film makes clear that if scientists can't explain evolution in a way the public can understand, misconceptions that threaten the credibility of the theory, and which creationists can exploit, will persist. One such misconception, repeated again and again in the film, is that humans are not descended from apes, as the fossil record shows we are.
For further enlightenment, read: Scientists and the Public: Barriers to Cross-Species Risk Communication,by Jody Lanard and Peter M. Sandman.
Some excellent thoughts for the day, from the University of Delaware’s writing program.
Critical reading is an active process of discovery. You discover where an author stands on an issue; you discover the strengths and weaknesses of the author’s argument; and you decide which side outweighs the other. The end result is that you have a better understanding of the issue.
Ultimately, this will lead to being a better writer, because critical reading is the first step to critical writing. Good writers look at the written word the way a carpenter looks at a house—they study the fine details and the way details connect and create the whole. The better you become at analyzing and reacting to another’s written work, the better you become at analyzing and reacting to your own: Is it logical? Do my points come across clearly? Are my examples solid enough? Is this the best wording? Is my conclusion persuasive?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When you read critically you might ask the following questions of the author as you read:
- What did you mean by that?
- Can you back up that statement
- How do you define that term?
- So what?
- How did you draw that conclusion?
- Do all experts agree?
- Isn't this evidence dated?
Or, you might think the following:
I recommend reading the whole piece and taking it to heart.
Folks concerned about rising rates of “illiteracy” among today’s youth may find today’s quotation especially apropos:
Our official culture is striving to force the new media to do the work of the old.
These are difficult times because we are witnessing a clash of cataclysmic proportions between two great technologies. We approach the new with the psychological conditioning and sensory responses of the old….
The youth of today are not permitted to approach the traditional heritage of mankind throughout the door of technological awareness. The only possible door for them is slammed in their faces by a rear-view mirror society.
The young today live mythically* and in depth. But they encounter instruction in situations organized by means of classified information—subjects are unrelated, they are visually conceived in terms of a blueprint.
It is a matter of the greatest urgency that…education must shift from instruction, from imposing of stencils, to discovery—to probing and exploration and to the recognition of the language of forms.
These words come from Marshall McLuhan’s and Quentin Fiore’s The Medium is the Massage: an inventory of effects, published in 1967—almost 40 years ago—but still startlingly fresh.* Myth is the mode of simultaneous awareness of a complex group of causes and effects…. Our technology forces us to live mythically, but we continue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separate planes.
The title of this post, McLuhan’s famous aphorism: “All media work us over completely,” explains the play on words in the title of his book. I’ve reread The Medium is the Massage many times in the 40 years since its publication, and learn something new from it each time.
Give this slender volume a gander. You’ll find it especially powerful for way in which its fusion of words and graphic design presages the Web, still 20 years in the future.
FDA asked to end drug ad warnings, read the headline on an interesting piece in Saturday’s newspaper. The article concerned a coalition of advertising and PR firms (Coalition for Healthcare Communication), partly funded by drug companies themselves, petitioning the federal Food and Drug Administration to strip the fine-print drug-ad warnings, arguing that the current regulations on direct- to-consumer drug ads “over warn and under inform” consumers.
The Coalition wants all drug ads simply to carry boilerplate warnings that advise consumers to discuss the drug’s potential health benefits and risks with their doctors, skipping the fine print that provides details.
“While some may think it desirable to tell consumers about all side effects and contraindications, no matter how clearly this information is communicated to consumers, a significant number will lack the education or background to comprehend or act on it,” the petition reads.
A policy analyst for Consumers Union disagrees, suggesting the ads need “clearer, but not less, information.”
The same paper carried an article about the “Health Buddy,” an electronic device used by the Concord Visiting Nurse Association to monitor various health indicators of 33 elders and other patients with chronic illnesses. The system keeps electronic tabs on health measures such as weight and blood pressure, and asks the user to respond to a series of pre-recorded questions. The recorded information gets transmitted to a full-time VNA staff person who responds with a phone call or a referral when the data indicates a potential problem.
People who use the electronic system receive training and “lessons,” including information about diet and other self-care measures.
These articles provide evidence of extraordinary shifts in both healthcare costs and health management responsibilities from doctors and hospitals to individuals and families—the people we persist in calling “consumers.”
Futurist Alvin Toffler calls these new consumers—people who “consume” some elements of health maintenance and illness treatment in the marketplace, and “produce” others for themselves—“prosumers.”
Clearly this new generation of prosumers needs clear communications: about preventive care and illness management, about when to rely on themselves and their support networks, and when to consult a medical professional, about the pros and cons of a particular drug, procedure, or medical device.
But who should develop the instructions? Should we rely on advertisers and public relations firms to deliver balanced information we need? Should we rely on information developed by health insurance companies, or medical professionals: doctors, pharmacists, dieticians, chiropractors?
Should prosumers trust information developed by individuals or professional groups that stand to benefit materially from the information and the behavior changes associated with it?
Doesn’t it make sense for healthcare prosumers themselves (consulting whatever experts they choose) to direct the collection, writing, continuous updating, and delivery of health information they need to protect themselves and their families?
VIA overturns the traditional clinician-patient dynamic, giving patients primary control of their own health information. Through VIA, young patients decide what is most important to communicate, show how their medical conditions affect them, and, in “real life” context, indicate what they need from medical care. VIA seeks to give voice to young patients, allowing them to take ownership of their health status and medical management. — Michael Rich, Video Intervention/Prevention Assessment (VIA) founder
What if information providers turned to their consumers, not just for help crafting better, more informed messages, but to foster their own learning? Would overall literacy improve?
Research conducted through the Video Intervention/Prevention Assessment (VIA) project at the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston indicates strongly that it could.
Founded by Dr. Michael Rich, once an aspiring filmmaker who studied with renowned Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, and an expert in media influence on children, VIA research gives video cameras to children, teens, and young adult patients with chronic illnesses, asking them to record the events of their daily lives and speak into the camera about their own thoughts, feelings, understanding, and experiences with their illness.
Rich et al. report that during a VIA pilot project with asthma patients, “Participants in the VIA pilot showed significant improvement in their asthma-specific quality of life after creating their visual narratives, but before viewing them or changing their disease management based on the research findings.”
In other words, the mere act of filming themselves improved the young patients’ health status (which previous medical interventions had failed to do).
The project also yielded an astonishing range of data useful for educating clinicians themselves, for instance:
VIA revealed that 95% of the participants were exposed to known asthma triggers that were not discovered using a standard-of-care medical history. Inappropriate use of medications was found in 83% of participants; 33% exceeded prescribed doses, 28% discontinued medications without consulting a clinician, and 72% used ineffective inhaler technique
Rich and colleagues found that the camera’s “distancing effect” let the young media-makers view their own lives and environments as onlookers, which changed their perceptions of themselves and their illness:
The camera has no selectivity; it documents what is there. When (participants viewed) the pilot VIA visual narratives, the distancing effect of the video allowed (them) to discover for themselves health-affecting exposures in their daily environments to which they were previously oblivious.
All educators might benefit from paying close attention to this extraordinary revelation of Rich’s asthma research (emphasis added):
All of the participants in the VIA pilot related biomedically accurate explanatory models of the asthma disease process. Because they were patients with moderate or severe asthma at a major medical center, these findings revealed the effectiveness of the asthma education that they had received as part of their medical care. However, in this group, accurate knowledge did not translate into effective health behaviors because participants did not always believe that their asthma management plans would be effective or that the potential benefits were worth the side effects. These asthma patients’ explanatory models addressed disease management rather than etiology. VIA was able to shed some light on the unclear relationship between health knowledge and behavior because it looked broadly at participants’ illness perceptions, rather than limiting itself to a focused inquiry into explanatory models of disease origins.
A closing question to ponder when thinking about sharing control over information flow: Could other communication tools, including words alone, accomplish what cameras do in VIA research?
Plain language (also called Plain English) is communication your audience can understand the first time they read or hear it. Language that is plain to one set of readers may not be plain to others. Written material is in plain language if your audience can:Find what they need;What is Plain Language?Understand what they find; and
It almost goes without saying that most forms of literacy rest on a foundation of clear, easy-to-understand wordsmithing. Good writing.
About a decade ago, a group of government employees concerned about making government documents clear and understandable to the general public spawned what has become known as the “plain language” movement. The call for plain language has spread to other fields: law, medicine, engineering, academia in general.
The group of federal employees that started the movement remains active as the Plain Language Action and Information Network (PLAIN); they’ve created a Web site rich with resources to help people write well. Writers can also find help at the nonprofit Plain Language Association’s excellent companion site.
Plain language boils down to the essential rules of thumb for good writing, which include organization with the reader in mind, setting verbs in the active voice, choosing common everyday words, cutting all unnecessary words, keeping sentences relatively short, using personal pronouns: (I, we, you), and making sure your graphics and page design techniques align well with your message and your readership.
I’ve posted a good number of the basic tools for clear writing since beginning this blog last April.
Defined by results
But, “No one technique defines plain language,” the government plain language Web site notes. “Rather, plain language is defined by results—it is easy to read, understand, and use.”
Aha! Defining by results. What a concept! But this question immediately pops up for me: How will we define “results”?
Have I increased “literacy,” for example, because 90 percent of my readers did well on a test of factual recall six months after they read our instruction manual? Or if a survey revealed that more than half my readers had changed behavior after reading my manual?
While these tests and surveys might reflect well on the clarity of my writing, they wouldn’t measure whether readers found the instruction manual culturally appropriate, or useful in novel situations the manual didn’t or couldn’t anticipate.
My tests wouldn’t measure what readers thought the instruction booklet should have covered, but didn’t, or whether readers found discrepancies between what I wrote and their own experiences putting the instructions to use. And it wouldn’t measure any unintended consequences arising from my manual: that many readers felt patronized, demoralized, powerless, or poorly understood, for instance.
If the writer makes up half the literacy equation, don’t I have to measure how I’ve improved my own literacy in the process of producing and evaluating my text?
Last week, I offered a description of literacy originally used in a report on health literacy, but which I believe speaks to literacy in all its many forms: “where the expectations, preferences and skills of individuals seeking information meet the expectations, preferences and skills of individuals providing information.
Another way of putting it: To foster literacy, information providers must also act as co-seekers, asking for, and incorporating what readers know. Providers must also invite their readers to participate as co-providers of essential information. The earlier in the writing process writers engage with their prospective readers, the better.
Most of us have had the experience seeking written information on a particular topic and feeling frustrated, for one or more of these and many related reasons:
You found the information too generic for practical use. Readers may not find even detailed how-to information useful. Often the details involve matters of place. Laws, rules, regulations, policies, demographics, access to professional services, availability of resources, etc., can vary dramatically from state to state, county to county, town to town. Your particular living situation may raise important concerns for you that others wouldn’t have.
The written material contained unacknowledged and unwarranted assumptions about you. The writer may have assumed your able-bodiedness, mobility, sexual orientation, control over a situation, a safe living situation, or access to certain resources (e.g., high-quality food, lawyers, reliable transportation).
You need information that spans many disciplines, but found information at hand limited to a single narrow dimension of your need. Statutes, organizational by-laws, budgets, self-interest, and many other factors, including ignorance, typically constrain the content of written materials. Writers rarely move beyond the scope of their own knowledge and immediate purpose to recognize other dimensions of their readers’ needs.
As a self-educated reader, you already had a good grasp of the empirical facts and the basic science involved, but you came seeking information because you haven’t found a way to act on what you know. You might feel frustrated by your own fear, denial or apathy, or by income limitations, cultural barriers, social isolation, family violence, legal matters, or a host of other concerns.
Because of your own experience, you could have supplied emphasis and details that would have improved the quality and usefulness of the written material. Almost everyone knows how that feels.
My point: In almost any matter involving people’s ability to seek, find, understand, and productively use information obtained from text and images—our standard definition of literacy—listeners or readers themselves bring half the literacy equation to the table, not only their skill with language, but their hopes, expectations, culture, and experience.
Much Extension work involves written communications intended to foster behavior change. No matter how well you write, if you think of yourself as the exclusive information provider and your readers as the passive seekers of the information you choose to provide, you may end up as part of illiteracy problem.
For some help starting to think about engaging your readers as co-producers, and yourself as a co-seeker, check out the August 1 - August 12 posts to Waking up Writing (scroll to bottom of page to begin).
With few exceptions, economic textbooks focus on households as consumers and fail to discuss households as producers using their own labor and capital. Households are presented to the modern student of economics at school or university as places of consumption. Economics theory focuses on consumer behavior, which concerns the choice of households on the quantities of the commodities they choose to buy given the limitations of their money incomes and the prices of commodities. With few exceptions, economic textbooks fail to discuss the allocation of time available to various processes of household production. They also fail to mention that household expenditures often are not purchases of goods ready to be consumed but are capital equipment, unfinished goods, raw materials and energy to be used as inputs to a production process. — Duncan Ironmonger, Household Production and the Household Economy
Among the few large-ticket consumer items I’ve bought brand-new in my lifetime, I count a washing machine, a chainsaw, a rototiller, a freezer, a lawn mower, and two bicycles. When I plunked down my cash or plastic, these items became duly registered as part of the Gross Domestic Product by which we consumer products toted up and accounted for in the gross domestic product.
But once I got them home, I began using each of these products to perform essential economic activities, to “produce” services for myself and my family. I invested in those products very much the way industries invest in capital equipment. In the case of the lawn mower, I use it to produce landscaping services for myself. I use the chainsaw to produce the fuel that heats out home, dries our clothes, pre-heats our water, and cooks some of our food during the winter months. I use the bicycle to maintain fitness of body and mind, and because I often bike to work during the warmer months, as basic transportation.
In some instances, I could have paid others to perform these services.
But our system of standard national accounts only “counts” what I pay for in dollars. What I do for myself or my family or as a community volunteer disappears.
Paying a day care provider to take care of my young child while I “work” counts. If I care for my own child, it doesn’t count. My payment for the vegetables I buy in a supermarket passes into the Gross Domestic Product. The vegetables I invest my own time and equipment to harvest from my own backyard don’t.
They may not count, but they do matter.
The household economy
A few economists have begun serious research that attempts to measure the size and shape and describe the importance of this invisible nonmarket economy, sometimes called “the household economy,” most notably Australian economist Duncan Ironmonger of the University of Melbourne. I took the quotation that introduces this post from his 2000 paper, Household Production and the Household Economy. Reading the whole thing will shake up your thinking about conventional economics and how it defines consumers and producers and what constitutes "economic" activity.
Literate consumers or literate producers?
How all this relates to “literacy” becomes the topic for my Waking Up Writing posts over the next week or two.
Most popular and professional writing on health literacy focuses on strategies for helping people become wiser consumers of professional health care products and services. Same with media literacy, which generally focuses helping people become more critical consumers of other people’s messages.
I don’t deny the importance of literacy education for consumers. But how would our thinking about literacy change if we considered ourselves and the people we touch with our educational outreach as primary health producers or media producers?
In 2004, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) issued a report entitled Health Literacy: A Prescription to End Confusion, which discussed the implications of the Institute’s finding that nearly half the nation’s adults “have difficulty understanding and using health information, and there is a higher rate of hospitalization and use of emergency services among patients with limited health literacy.”
I found this interesting statement tucked into the IOM report:
Health literacy is where the expectations, preferences and skills of individuals seeking information meet the expectations, preferences and skills of individuals providing information.
I think this approach gets to the heart of the general notion of “literacy.” Notice that it places shared and interdependent responsibility on information seeker and provider alike.
The adverb where gives the approach a particularly spatial flavor, locating literacy in that invisible realm psychologists call “intersubjective space.” This invisible space encompasses language, culture, worldviews, hopes, values, feelings, dreams, concepts, theories, memories, and all the other invisible forces we use to understand and to act (or refrain from acting).
By this definition, communications aimed at developing literacy require more than clear and accurate statements of empirical fact.
Stay tuned. I plan to explore this line of thinking in a series of posts over the next few weeks.
I agree that being technologically educated is not the same thing as being literate. I also suggest that being merely literate is not the same thing as being productively educated.Even many intellectuals have not always been so sanguine about literacy.� Plato thought that literacy was a disaster. In the Phaedrus�Plato argued that literacy would, indeed, destroy minds. Writing would destroy memory, weaken the rational powers, and lead people away from, rather than towards, the truth. Writing destroyed accountability. The author became alienated from the word and the word from the author. The author lost the ability to defend the word that, in its written form, remained passive and inert, defenseless and unresponsive.
Perhaps, as many students of the orality-literacy distinction have argued, literacy was indeed mind destroying. Many have argued that literacy was built on the destruction of the oral mind. It may be that the Internet will rot our literate or would-be literate minds just as literacy initiated the rotting of the oral mind. On the other hand, perhaps we should worry less about what will happen to the literate mind and more about what, if anything, will replace it. - Al Cheyne (Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada) Will the Internet Rot Your Mind?
Three seemingly disparate recent news items connect and reflect one another through Cheyne's comments:
Item: From a December 16 New York Times piece by Sam Dillon, Literacy Falls for Graduates From College, Testing Finds, we learn that �the average American college graduate's literacy in English declined significantly over the past decade, according to results of a nationwide test released yesterday.
The National Assessment of Adult Literacy, given in 2003 by the Department of Education, is the nation's most important test of how well adult Americans can read�When the test was last administered, in 1992, 40 percent of the nation's college graduates scored at the proficient level, meaning that they were able to read lengthy, complex English texts and draw complicated inferences. But on the 2003 test, only 31 percent of the graduates demonstrated those high-level skills.
The college graduates who in 2003 failed to demonstrate proficiency included 53 percent who scored at the intermediate level and 14 percent who scored at the basic level, meaning they could read and understand short, commonplace prose texts.
Three percent of college graduates who took the test in 2003, representing some 800,000 Americans, demonstrated "below basic" literacy, meaning that they could not perform more than the simplest skills, like locating easily identifiable information in short prose.
Grover J. Whitehurst, director of an institute within the Department of Education that helped to oversee the test, said he believed that the literacy of college graduates had dropped because a rising number of young Americans in recent years had spent their free time watching television and surfing the Internet.
"We're seeing substantial declines in reading for pleasure, and it's showing up in our literacy levels," he said.
Item: Long headline from a recent Cable in the Classroom ("The cable industry's education foundation") press release: Textbooks May Be Going the Way of Eight-Track Tapes in New Era of Digital Content, Say Education, Technology Experts: Games, Interactivity, Simulations, Streaming Video, Multimedia Transforming Education Landscape: Classrooms Need to Catch the Wave.
The press release reports on a forum it says drew school district administrators, representatives of teacher unions, virtual education providers, cable programmers, teachers, and education organization leaders, to explore "how digital content and technology can enhance and expand learning, and what these developments mean for the way we prepare teachers, involve parents, and design classrooms for a new digital education environment."
< snip>
Digital education content is making it both possible and necessary to reinvent schools, said a panel of education leaders and technology experts at a forum hosted by Cable in the Classroom (CIC) and the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) held Friday."Wiring schools is the beginning of the story," said Douglas Levin, director of education policy for Cable in the Classroom. "But the content is also a vital piece of the puzzle, in many ways the most meaningful piece."
"Quality content is the key to whether students succeed or fail in the learning enterprise, and digital content is a rich, deep well," said Helen Soule, Ph.D., executive director of Cable in the Classroom. "If we think about the resources that are out there, and if we think of how we could -- and should -- transform schools, we have an opportunity to create the kind of classrooms that will help children take their place in the highly competitive global marketplace that awaits them."
Then further down:
Electronic gaming offers enormous possibilities for learning, as a totally engaging medium demanding rapid decision-making, short- and long-term thinking, and the willingness to fail repeatedly before succeeding.Item: In the November 6 issue of Wired News, an AP story, Imagine, Make It Real in Fab Lab reports on a pilot MIT initiative that has established Fabrication Labs in which ordinary citizens, given a bit of training, use cutting-edge computer-controlled fabrication tools to fashion their own creations. MIT has established seven Fab Labs as free community resources in places as distant as Norway and Ghana. The project has equipped the labs with commercially available tools, such as laser cutters, milling machines, and electronic assembly tools.
"Open-source software and MIT-written programs control the devices, machining parts to tolerances that once could be achieved only using equipment costing hundreds of thousands of dollars," the AP writer notes.
Fab Lab output can be practical, or whimsical.I won't take up more space speculating on the future of what we loosely call "literacy," but simply remind you that humans have come only recently to mass literacy and that pre-literate humans created impressively sophisticated societies.
- Herders in northern Norway erected a telecommunications network to track their sheep's wanderings with radio antennas and electronic tags.
- In India, farmers created measurement tools to ensure a safe milk supply and measure fat content, and women found a way to scan and print carved wooden blocks used for a local kind of embroidery. In a separate project, villagers designed small LED lights for use in areas lacking electricity.
- Villagers in Ghana, meanwhile, harnessed solar power to make electricity and cook food rather than relying on firewood.
- On the fanciful front, a teenage girl in Boston created a diary security system that photographs anyone coming near the owner's private writings -- say, a nosey brother.
Citizen inventors with only modest technical expertise swap ideas with counterparts at other Fab Labs around the world by electronically sharing design blueprints or going to a Fab Lab website that offers project ideas.
"If you give people access to means to solve their own problems, it touches something very, very deep, said Neil Gershenfeld, an MIT physicist and computer scientist who is among the movement's chief proponents. "There's sort of this deep thing inside that most people don't express that comes tumbling out when they get access to these tools," he said.I work from the assumption that technologies not yet imagined will both transcend and incorporate, not only the conventional print literacy traditional educators now revere, but also our current electronic media literacies. Electronic media have irrevocably altered the power structures that mass print media created and have already begun eroding the legitimacy of our current political, economic, and educational gatekeeping systems.
The Cable in the Classroom press release warned:
Parents, school board members, other education leaders, and teachers are going to need professional development to catch up with the new ways children are learning.I doubt most of their elders have a prayer of ever catching up.
Posted by pboyles at 7:28 PM
[I’d started writing this before I read Thom Linehan’s excellent guest post on Monday, Are we under the influence?. I think you’ll see the close connection between my reflections below and Thom’s suggestion “that critically reflecting on the popular culture messages that impact ourselves and the folks we work with is an essential part of relevant & effective education.]
A few days ago, I received an email from a professional colleague, offering this link as a resource for new ways to promote healthful eating. Of course I clicked and had some fun perusing what turned out to be the “Health Calendar” pages of the Food and Health Communications, Inc. Web site.
November, 2005, of the Health Calendar brought us Fig Week and Split Pea Week. January ’06 will serve up Prune Breakfast Month, Fiber Focus Month, Hot Tea Month, Oatmeal Month, Pear Month, and Soup Month, among others.
October of 2006 delivers a mind-blowing list of 40 “month” and “week” designations, serving, without apparent regard for the delicious dissonance, as both Pork Month and Vegetarian Awareness Month, as well as Pizza Month, Popcorn Month, and Dessert Month. Next year will also bring us Hot Dog Month, Ice Cream Month, Catfish Month, Peach Month and Snack Food Month.
Food and Health Communications, Inc., which publishes all sorts of high-quality instructional materials for teachers to use for nutrition education, claims on its Web site: “Our materials are based on peer-reviewed, current scientific information. We do not accept advertising or funding by any outside organization.”
Maybe so. But a brief perusal of the Health Calendar pages reveals something I find even more disturbing.
Clicking on Fiber Focus Month, for instance, brings readers directly to the Kellogg’s homepage, Oatmeal Month to the Quaker Oatmeal homepage, and Prune Breakfast month to the California Dried Plums (a trade organization) homepage.
The Picnic Month link takes readers to the American Plastics Council homepage. Hot Dog Month leads to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council. And on and on.
What company or trade organization needs to pay for ads when the site (whose URL gets distributed to nutritionists and health educators nationwide via professional listservs) delivers readers directly to their corporate Web homepage, under the banner of food and health no less?
The youth of today live mythically and in depth. But they encounter instruction in situations organized by means of classified information…. Many of our [teaching] institutions suppress all the natural direct experience of youth, who respond with untaught delight to the poetry and the beauty of the new [electronic] environment, the environment of popular culture. It could be their door to all past achievement if studied as an active (and not necessarily benign) force….It is a matter of greatest urgency that our educational institutions realize that we now have civil war among these environments created by media other than the printed word…Education must shift from instruction, from imposing of stencils, to discovery—to probing and exploration and to the recognition of the language of forms. Marshall McLuhan, 1967, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects
I love the Somewhere North of Boston (S.N.O.B.) Film Festival, hosted each year by New Hampshire Technical Institute in Concord. Today’s Concord Monitor carried a brief preview of this year’s festival. This quotation by featured Concord filmmaker Mike Eschenbach caught my eye:
I’m a documentary guy—as far back as I can remember, my mom used to have me dissect commercials and figure out how we were being manipulated to buy insurance of whatever they were selling.What I was 8 years old, it seemed sort of like she was a killjoy. But it gave me a critical eye and an appreciation for the real. Non-fiction has never been boring to me. It’s life.
Karen Blass gave us a thoughtful post on media literacy July 8, describing the importance of teaching ourselves, and then our children, to reflect critically on the barrage of messages flowing from our media-saturated environments.
Many of you may not know that Karen has spent the past four years taking courses, attending conferences, researching participating in discussion groups to develop special expertise in media literacy. She’s on the topic, specifically targeting parents of teenagers. She has plans to launch a media literacy blog soon. I look forward to it with great anticipation.
The vast and loosely-integrated field of “literacy studies” recognizes many forms of literacy, which include the traditional prose literacy , document literacy, and quantitative literacy (also known as numeracy). We also have the visual and media literacies Karen introduced, the new and rapidly-evolving field of digital literacy, and the essential arena of health literacy. The list goes on.
An overarching discipline called critical literacy examines the power relationships implicit in all media by asking the kinds of questions Karen poses at the end of her post.
Beginning this fall, I plan to develop blocks of blog posts that introduce various aspects of literacy in manageable tidbits. I hope they will accumulate to become a cohesive online literacy resources collection I can organize on a separate Web page for your use in informing yourself and the many publics with whom you collaborate.
If you have an interest in literacy issues, or you’d like to contribute to this literacy project, either by guest posting or by sending suggestions for good resources, please call (225-2205, ext. 321) or email me: peg.boyles@unh.edu.