Bill Cope, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Began by noting the strangeness of talking to an audience about social media, while also seeing faces lit by computer screens suggesting multi-tasking.
Referenced new translation of Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility" (note the shift in the more familiar title).
His talk will explore the peculiar affordances of the digital.
Purportedly new -- the concept of the virtual, as if virtual worlds are
anything new. From the moment of writing, we have created technologies
of telepresence. Purportedly new -- hypertextual non-linearity.
Neglected moments in modern textuality. Alphabetical movable type 1450 -- the invention of modern manufacturing techniques. Nothing textual of interest happened until 1500. By 1500,. 9 million books had been printed. Revolutionary invention of all is the page number (indexes, contents, references -- all mechanisms designed for nonlinear readings). Interextual, intratextual, and cultural orders. (Hypertext is just a marginally faster technology for linking text.)
Petrus Ramus, 1515-1572 -- a textbook publisher. An original method -- building methodically structured texts around learnable fragments. (Walter Ong's Decay of Dialog.)
What could be new in New Media?
New Media: Agency, DIffernces, Multimodality, Navigation.
New Learning: Design, Productive Diverfsity, Synaesthesia, Reflexive Pedagogy.
The printed encyclopedia had a cultural aura; an encyclopedia on CD is not that different, but a multilingual Wikipedia is fundamentally new.
Gamer Theroy McKenzie Wark's Gamer Theory book. Showed delicious as a bibliograhy, YouTube as television, an obscure video gets 11 views but those are 11 significant views; FPS is a narrative (profoundly different from a novel or cinematic experience) -- the difference in every case is agency.
We used to live in a world with tidy distinctions between actor/aucience, writer/reader. (What an anachronism, says Cope, to test reading comprehenson as a proxy for assessing literacy.)
Shift in postFordist workpaces, we want products that are flexibly adaptable by the customer, on the fly.
Schools? Apocalyptic sense that one day we will realize they are so utterly behind that they will collapse... sent crazy by the ineptness of those environments.
Used to live in a world of mass media, we could come to school and talk about the same things the next day. One or two local newspapers. Creates enormous openings for agency, by the new realm of consumption and work. Difference becomes an issue. Cateogries defeat their purpose when there are so many categories ... introduced first-order and second-order differences. (He went quickly through that -- I haven't done it justice here.) New dynamics of differencde; not just difference but divergence -- the active process of becoming more different, due to the autonomy of agency. Economies of small cultural scale... polyglossia. Language diversity is being preserved via Wikipedia. (You can construct a character for a sound that only exists in one language, and that character appears in Wikipedia.)
Multimodality.A funny thing happened after Gutenberg... modular manufactuer unit moved from the character to the pixel -- revolutionary in that you can put image and text easily together. (Old books used to have a separate section of photo plates because the technology for printing images and text was very different.)
Kress -- the shift from word culture to image culture. (Invoked Protestants smashing stained glass icons because of their relationship to contoversial words.)
Cope says he does not think we are moving away from the word.
The shift from word culture to image culture -- photolithography, offset printing technology. The shift happened 50-70 years ago.
Are we writing or are we talking? Linguistically, an e-mail and microblogging is the grammar of speaking. "The visual is becoming wordier." Architects refer to the grammar of a builidng being readable from the structure.
In airports and shopping centers, we see more words than ever before. News channels have heaps of writing (partially an affordance issue, since writing is easy to get into video now).
Navigation: New kinds of navigational strategies. Disentangle from the navigation that is intrinsic to written text from the 1500s.
When was text first digitized? When was the first mass application of digital text?
My answer --- morse code? Telegraph?
Cope's answer -- Phototypesetting. (I used something very similar as an undergraduate!)
Generalized Markup Language -- imortant textual moment, became SGML. Notes that CSS separates structure from form, in order to allow for variability of rendering. Radical abandonment of typographical markup.
Berners-Lee botched this in HTML, so the history of HTML since then involves undoing that bungle. We are in the digital incunabula -- (print incunabula was the print period before printing was stabilized.)
Not PDFs or Google algorythm that searches random words; not the chaotic world of uploading random files. All these are legacies of the typographic world.
I'd love to get ahold of his slide on new types of text work -- he only flashed it on the screen. (Tantalizing! Frustrating!)
We need to know design principles to get around, metacognition, producing new cognitive orders (which he barely flashed on the screen).
I feel like I'm watching an advertisement for forthcoming work rather than seeing a coherent speech, but the subject matter is intriguing.
Design is a form of action, atransformation. YOu start with available designs, you design, you end up with the re-designed.
Walked us through a four-part slide on things you do to know... went by quite quickly
How to move from one-size-fits-all education. Fundamentally different classroom,.
Synaesthesia matches with the intrinsic multimodality with new media. In school, we are forced in a mold of writing "correct" letters, when in fact when we start we are more creative in what we communicate (showed child's freehand design of circles which, to the child, represented a car). Multimodality is a path to lieracy, since learners who are good in one area can follow a path to learning how to do things in other ways.
Didactic - Mimetic
Authentic - Syntehtic
Transformative - Reflexive
Books:
CGLearner "Learning by Design"
L-by-D.com
The Assess-As-You-Go Writing Assistant. (Does everything that George Bush would have wanted, and does it much better.) Tries to end the distinction between formative and summative assessment.
wwcope.com
Neglected moments in modern textuality. Alphabetical movable type 1450 -- the invention of modern manufacturing techniques. Nothing textual of interest happened until 1500. By 1500,. 9 million books had been printed. Revolutionary invention of all is the page number (indexes, contents, references -- all mechanisms designed for nonlinear readings). Interextual, intratextual, and cultural orders. (Hypertext is just a marginally faster technology for linking text.)
Petrus Ramus, 1515-1572 -- a textbook publisher. An original method -- building methodically structured texts around learnable fragments. (Walter Ong's Decay of Dialog.)
What could be new in New Media?
New Media: Agency, DIffernces, Multimodality, Navigation.
New Learning: Design, Productive Diverfsity, Synaesthesia, Reflexive Pedagogy.
The printed encyclopedia had a cultural aura; an encyclopedia on CD is not that different, but a multilingual Wikipedia is fundamentally new.
Gamer Theroy McKenzie Wark's Gamer Theory book. Showed delicious as a bibliograhy, YouTube as television, an obscure video gets 11 views but those are 11 significant views; FPS is a narrative (profoundly different from a novel or cinematic experience) -- the difference in every case is agency.
We used to live in a world with tidy distinctions between actor/aucience, writer/reader. (What an anachronism, says Cope, to test reading comprehenson as a proxy for assessing literacy.)
Shift in postFordist workpaces, we want products that are flexibly adaptable by the customer, on the fly.
Schools? Apocalyptic sense that one day we will realize they are so utterly behind that they will collapse... sent crazy by the ineptness of those environments.
Used to live in a world of mass media, we could come to school and talk about the same things the next day. One or two local newspapers. Creates enormous openings for agency, by the new realm of consumption and work. Difference becomes an issue. Cateogries defeat their purpose when there are so many categories ... introduced first-order and second-order differences. (He went quickly through that -- I haven't done it justice here.) New dynamics of differencde; not just difference but divergence -- the active process of becoming more different, due to the autonomy of agency. Economies of small cultural scale... polyglossia. Language diversity is being preserved via Wikipedia. (You can construct a character for a sound that only exists in one language, and that character appears in Wikipedia.)
Multimodality.A funny thing happened after Gutenberg... modular manufactuer unit moved from the character to the pixel -- revolutionary in that you can put image and text easily together. (Old books used to have a separate section of photo plates because the technology for printing images and text was very different.)
Kress -- the shift from word culture to image culture. (Invoked Protestants smashing stained glass icons because of their relationship to contoversial words.)
Cope says he does not think we are moving away from the word.
The shift from word culture to image culture -- photolithography, offset printing technology. The shift happened 50-70 years ago.
Are we writing or are we talking? Linguistically, an e-mail and microblogging is the grammar of speaking. "The visual is becoming wordier." Architects refer to the grammar of a builidng being readable from the structure.
In airports and shopping centers, we see more words than ever before. News channels have heaps of writing (partially an affordance issue, since writing is easy to get into video now).
Navigation: New kinds of navigational strategies. Disentangle from the navigation that is intrinsic to written text from the 1500s.
When was text first digitized? When was the first mass application of digital text?
My answer --- morse code? Telegraph?
Cope's answer -- Phototypesetting. (I used something very similar as an undergraduate!)
Generalized Markup Language -- imortant textual moment, became SGML. Notes that CSS separates structure from form, in order to allow for variability of rendering. Radical abandonment of typographical markup.
Berners-Lee botched this in HTML, so the history of HTML since then involves undoing that bungle. We are in the digital incunabula -- (print incunabula was the print period before printing was stabilized.)
Not PDFs or Google algorythm that searches random words; not the chaotic world of uploading random files. All these are legacies of the typographic world.
I'd love to get ahold of his slide on new types of text work -- he only flashed it on the screen. (Tantalizing! Frustrating!)
We need to know design principles to get around, metacognition, producing new cognitive orders (which he barely flashed on the screen).
I feel like I'm watching an advertisement for forthcoming work rather than seeing a coherent speech, but the subject matter is intriguing.
Design is a form of action, atransformation. YOu start with available designs, you design, you end up with the re-designed.
Walked us through a four-part slide on things you do to know... went by quite quickly
How to move from one-size-fits-all education. Fundamentally different classroom,.
Synaesthesia matches with the intrinsic multimodality with new media. In school, we are forced in a mold of writing "correct" letters, when in fact when we start we are more creative in what we communicate (showed child's freehand design of circles which, to the child, represented a car). Multimodality is a path to lieracy, since learners who are good in one area can follow a path to learning how to do things in other ways.
Didactic - Mimetic
Authentic - Syntehtic
Transformative - Reflexive
Books:
- New Learning
- Ubiquitous Learning
CGLearner "Learning by Design"
L-by-D.com
The Assess-As-You-Go Writing Assistant. (Does everything that George Bush would have wanted, and does it much better.) Tries to end the distinction between formative and summative assessment.
wwcope.com
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