Recently I was discussing, with colleagues, the sometimes vexed question of media literacies. In what sense should people be literate today—in what mode, or in what medium? Does literacy in one mode or medium mean you lose literacy in others. For example, do web literate “youth”—and “youth” is a term I don’t like at all because it implies a bunch of people who are all the same—lose their ability to read, or even worse, to concentrate. Is attention now a literacy? There are, today, a series of media panics about literacies, although this probably tells us more about the world at large than literacy per se.

We decided the central question concerning media literacies was variability, but what does this mean? For me, several things perhaps—

This does not mean fixed differences between established media, but ongoing variability in a very dynamic climate. The models that are a crucial part of literacy dynamics, and often the established businesses— newspapers, television channels, are all collapsing or changing dramatically. At the same time lots of new models, businesses, experience frameworks arise of course, although most of these are destined to fail (!). Everything is in constant variation. As Marx had it, famously, all that is solid melts into air: audiences, reception, production processes, narrative, software, business models, communications processes, advertising models etc. It’s very exciting but also pretty scary. All this this perhaps implies the need for a new “metaliteracy” - an ability to adapt. This is the single biggest thing to my mind. Our happier, more successful students have generally been those who’ve got this and gone with it.

This does not mean, however, that you don’t have to develop current literacies. Quite the opposite.

The first move here is acceptance (resistance is futile but surprisingly many students, not to mention staff, desperately resist many aspects of media literacies) and …

The second move is commitment to higher level literacy skills and knowledges over a range of areas. in short, the more you develop multiple literacies, the more you will be able to adapt as they change. It’s a bit like learning languages. One is work but we do it “naturally”. For those of us not growing up in bilingual homes, learning the second is hard work. However, once you’ve got two or three languages down, it’s much easier to adapt to more. Media literacies and knowledges are like that. You need to know how to make a competent video—in short, today you need visual literacy in production as well as in visual analysis—but you still need to know how to read and write text (and edit it, as well as publish in a range of forms!). You need to be able to put a good tweet together, but also be able to talk to a range of people face to face.

A problem: we think we get this. We are all these days used to “choice”—but this means, “if I don’t like doing this, I’ll just do that, etc”. Choice works in our favour—we get to choose. This is to some extent now changing. “Variability” will sometimes mean this, but it will just as often mean the opposite. That is, as above .. you will have to be good at more things that change, that are moving targets, that are demanding, and concerning which you have no choice. You must be more literate in more ways.

It’s about knowledge as well, across a range of areas.. You need to know about complex media set ups these days, but you also need to know about politics, climate change, urban conditions, social policy, the history of ideas, etc … all of these are also highly variable, subject to context. Most of the people (e.g. people like Jon Stewart) who do well these days are people who understand media variability and also, simply put, are broadly literate. They know lots of “stuff” (yes even non-media “stuff”). They can communicate, and work with this “stuff”, across a wide range of situations. So media literacies means more than knowing what the latest video is on YouTube (although this is definitely part of it). All forms of literacy—essay writing, reading, video production etc—are not just “outcomes” .. they need to be established (stage one) so that you get to the interesting stuff—knowing and working with content, real relationships, business, whatever (stage two).

Beyond this points are all the obvious. The media as we know it are changing very dramatically, as is the nature of media work. Perhaps a fair bit of the industry (to be fair, less often media workers, but more often the structures within which media work takes place) still has its head in the sand, or thinks it can self-spin or re-regulate its way out of the problems. Yet that still leaves those with their heads above the sand doing really interesting stuff.

Media Studies is currently caught betwixt and between all this.

Ages ago I wrote an article called “Auditland” which I never published. In it, I wondered a lot about the new micro-controls over education. Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about these in relation to other aspects of education—the ease with which many of these controls are assumed as natural, the strangeness of the debates that surround education (for example, in which the Christian right in the US objects to cognitivist-based “mastery learning” because it doesn’t “break the will” of the child), but most of all I’ve been thinking about the relation between models, technics and what happens when these are brought into the mess of everyday experience.

So I’m interested in the power of models, their messy arrival in actual events, and in the power of education as a way that models come into the rest of society.

So this blog is about models of education for the most part, although I’ll also link up to interesting discussions and so on about other things to do with education.

The question I’m currently thinking about with regard to our media programs “network literacies project” (being convened by the amazing Mat Wall-Smith who is a great theorist as well as technician and educator), is again one of models. I can put this simply if I don’t have to answer the questions that arise. There are lots of models of education, but the most prominent since WW2 has undoubtedly been the “cognitivist” model. Human brains are like computers, with inputs, symbolic processing, and outputs, and human systems, such as education, should follow this. Thus the supposed need for everything to be defined in terms of learning outcomes, attributes etc. This seems to line everything up particular well when you bring education and technology together. However, what happens when you introduce feedback, when you can’t predict where the system will go? In short, how many of the standard models of education are thrown in the air, precisely by open access and new media interventions in the experience of learning? Michael Bauwens sums the event up well as “the maturation of network cultures as counter-institutions”.

I find this throwing in the air of the old models pretty exciting. It’s also something of relief. Here I will only quote a great book on Gregory Bateson by Noel Charlton:

He believes it possible that we can recover “the grace” of realizing our interrelated membership of the community of living organisms on the planet. The route to this realization is iva personal engagement with the more-than-rational processes of the natural world and of human art. Poetry, painting, dance, music, humor, metaphor, “the best of religion”, and “natural history” all offer to us the possibility of renewed access to the wisdom that we, as species, have gained during millions of years of evolution—now overlaid and rendered unavailable to us by our “self-conscious purposiveness” … he means that we have learned, through the centuries, to identiy single goals for our purposes. We have come to think of causality as a series of straight-line, “knock-on” effects that be managed by a single human “self”, in its own personal interests—without allowing for all the interpenetrating influences and effects flowing between each of us and the wider living world. (Gregory Bateson: Mind, Beauty, and the Sacred Earth, p1)

I’m not sure if I’m currently as optimistic as Charlton or Bateson, and I should quality the “spirituality” here as meaning something—in Bateson’s terms—to do with reconnecting to the world at large (Deleuze and Guattari said the problem is that we don’t believe in the world anymore). However, what excites about many aspects of education (and technology, networks, open access, new concepts, methods and models) is that there is so much movement towards inter-connection, relationality, complexity. It’s a great time to be involved in education.