Fact is stranger than fiction

Image by birgerking via Flickr

Thoughts for Larry Ferlazzo

Thinking about folklore and the importance of reading, I reflected on the transmittal of folklore and not on the legendary content itself.  Coming down through history, most folklore was passed on from mouth to ear and children could only hear the stories at a time when someone else was willing to relate them.  The importance of reading is in being able to access those stories – or any information – at a time that suits them.  There are issues too of stories being lost as time goes on, or of consistency – one is reminded of the Chinese Whispers game.

I often use history as a basis for comparison when introducing social media with newcomers to online tools.  Looking at world literacy statistics today, there are millions of people who are unable to read, but comparing those statistics with a time say 300 years ago is startling.  Almost all of the middle to lower classes were illiterate and relied on alternative forms of communication for the goings on of the day.  Add to that the concept that most people never travelled farther than 100 miles from the place they were born in their entire lives and you begin to paint a picture of an information poor society.

In terms of publishing, sites like this blog are an incredible achievement in providing a forum for the sharing of ideas.  Historically, the ability to publish was almost exclusively open to only the clergy, learned and very rich.  Even Jane Austen struggled initially to find a publisher for her stories as recently as 1811.  When we read historical documents, the stories of millions of people have been lost because of an inability to read, write and publish;  Perhaps they could have become some of our greatest literary works.

Social media, blogs, self-publishing and a range of other modern-day constructs bring the ability to record current history for all time in a way that has never been possible before.  The story of the everyday person can be told.  The ability to read is the first part of that process, and that is why it is so important.

Related articles

• Tweet to Learn History (eduhowto.wordpress.com)
• Reflecting on Education with Larry Ferlazzo (teacherleaders.typepad.com)
• Study shows younger consumers value site participation, engagement (liesdamnedliesstatistics.com)

Multiliteracy

I’ve been thinking about multiliteracy.

I first started thinking about IT Literacy but developed my thinking broader than that – involving all the interrelated aspects.

Take word clouds for example.  They are commonly used on the Internet both to display tags, or prominent words from a site.  Here’s one on “Academics” from Wordle.net (Click to open and view larger)

To understand this word cloud there are multiple levels of understanding required.  Some of the elements of this image have semantic meaning and other elements have only visual meaning. 

Do the words have an order or a position on the page that is important?  No.

Usually words are arranged on a page – like this one – in an order suitable for forming sentences.  In the example given above, the words are a kind of list – but not.  In “web speak” this collection of words is called a cloud.  Some users seem to intrinsically know that the words should be read individually but for others it’s a concept that needs to be explained.

Are the spaces between the words important? No.

Words can sometimes be arranged artistically so that the dark or white space forms a kind of image.  Sometimes in this setting the actual words have no meaning at all, other than as a form of media with which to “paint” or “create”.  Take this example here:

In this case, it is the pattern that is important.  The words simply fill the space – but the size and orientation of the words does not matter.  The shape could provide an alternative meaning.  For example:

seems to be an oxymoron.  What is really being said here -

• I love to hate you?
• I hate to love you?
• I pretend to love you but inside my secret is that I hate you?
• You may think that I hate you, but really I love you?

A certain kind of shape/text pattern congruence/incongruence literacy must exist to explore these deeper questions.

Returning to the first example of the tag cloud there are other questions too:

Are the colours of the words important? No.

The colours could be used to define multiple categories – so all words of the same colour belong somehow together.  In this case they are not, but spurious understanding could develop from attaching meaning to the colours that was not intended by the creator.  Visually though the colours are important, in that they negate the need for so much white space as contrasting words are easier to pick out and read.

Are the size of the words important? Yes!

Literate readers must negate colour, placement, order and pattern in the example - but should understand that size is important.  In this case, the size of the words on the page indicates the popularity of that word or phrase.  The more often a word appears in a page or site, then the larger it appears in the tag or word cloud.  It may indicate that the word is important – but it may also indicate that it’s often used.

Other meanings:

In order to be fully literate, a reader should understand that the word cloud is a representation of underlying data.  When viewing the above image, it might need to be explained to users that the image was not created by typing words into an image programme, but that a long list of words, or a blog, or wiki or website was fed into a programme and that the most repeated words were visually represented in the cloud.  Sometimes the words also appear sideways and upside-down.  Likewise, there is no semantic meaning to the orientation of words, other than for visual interest.

I’m sure there are other aspects of this word cloud that might be interpreted in ways that I haven’t considered – please comment me to add your thoughts.

Taking this into account – do we need a wider view of IT Literacy to include “multiliteracy”??

By the way, if you have an interest in discovering and illustrating patterns in data, then Neoformix is an excellent site! Take a look and see whether you can intrinsically understand the semantics of the graphs, or whether some of your multiliteracy needs developing.