Jay Lemke argues that these new media are highly multimedia in that they integrate images, sounds, animation, and video, as well as interactive participation. They are also constructed around hypertext links that allow users to construct their own trajectory through hypermedia environments. Given the user's active role, they are therefore highly interactive, inviting users to participate in different, unique ways. He cites the example of websites and digital games that are based on feature films:

The Lord of the Rings:

New Line Cinema.
Electronic Arts videogames series
Sierra videogames series

The Matrix:

Warner Bros.
video game site

The Prince of Persia:
[ a game in which the user controls the time of the game]

He argues that the meaning constructed by active users or fans at these sites involves their active participation in games based on their intertextual knowledge of the original films on which the games are based. While these sites may be designed to invite certain defined, singular, predetermined meanings, or what Bakhtin described as monologic as opposed to multiple, alternative, dialogic meanings. For example, while The Lord of the Rings games may invite players to adopt certain stances or attitudes towards the “good” versus “evil” characters through the implied meanings of certain images, sounds, and intertextual references to the original films, players may not necessarily adopt those implied stances or attitudes. At the same time, these different media are different and therefore imply different meanings:

No text tells the full story of an image, every image can lead elsewhere than the text demands. The more diverse the media included, the more opportunities there are to subvert monologic design by foregrounding the divergence among meaning effects from different media. I believe this is the most important new principle for critical literacy that multimedia as such offers us. In order to understand how to make use of it, we need to know much better both how monological design strategies work to keep us from exploiting the different potential messages in each of the component media and how different media really do provide different meaning affordances from one another

This leads him to call for further research that examines how:

• designers construct multimedia and work towards monologic, or in some cases, perhaps dialogic or even deconstructive effects.

• hypermedia allow diverse meaning trajectories to be pursued by users and how users learn to relate these to each other to gain a sense of the overall system of possibilities of a hypermedia web.

• users of educational software and multimedia make meanings across the different modalities and genres which they contain.

• affect and meaning interact as we do so. We can study how people make meaning and experience feelings in real time as we move through and across websites and virtual worlds such as those in digital games.

• meanings made in virtual worlds come to be integrated into longer term learning and development as we move back and forth between them and the rest of our lives.

• we integrate meanings across various attentional spaces on different timescales from seconds to hours.

• meanings are made in multimedia through the affordances of space, time, place, pace, objects, artifacts, persons, and embedded media.

For further reading on Lemke’s theories of digital learning:

Lemke, J. (1998). Metamedia literacy: Transforming meanings and media. In D. Reinking, L. Labbo, M. McKenna, & R. Kiefer (Eds.), Handbook of literacy and technology: Transformations in a post-typographic world(pp.283-301). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. [Online]

Lemke, J.L. 2002. Notes on multimedia and hypertext. [Online]

Lemke, J. L. (in press). Travels in hypermodality. Visual Communication. [Online]

This means that teachers need to consider ways of using digital tools to do more than simply search out and rehash existing information. They need to use them as what David Jonassen (2000) describes as “mindtools” as learners who construct their own understanding through use of these tools (Jonassen, Howland, Moore, & Marra, 2002). Constructivist teaching requires that learners are confronting problems and issues that require new ways of thinking. Rather than simply function as passive recipients of pre-packaged information—as is the case with transmission instruction, learners operating in constructivist learning sites are engaged in open-ended learning environments that are more consistent with the real life situations they will encounter in the future.

Open-ended learning environments rely heavily on the quality of learner’s task management and decision making processes (Perkins 1991). These open-ended, ill-structured environments can be challenging for novice learners who may bring naïve or everyday understandings to their learning based on a “I know what I know” attitude. This requires that they apply metacognitive reflection to continually determine the need to revise their stances and adopt new ways of thinking and knowing. To assist novice learns, open-ended environments need to providing scaffolding that assists them within their Vygotsky’s (1978) “zone of proximal development.” These scaffolds include certain digital tools that can help learners participate in the problem-solving process.

See Dave Jonassen’s course on constructivist learning and technology (specific examples of using technology to foster constructivist learning)

Digital literacies also include the uses of various social practices involved in online exchanges that occur through e-mail, chats, bulletin boards, MOO’s, MUD’s, or blogs. These sites can function as “communities of practice” if they, as “open-learning environments,” provide helpful assistance to socialize new members into the community and support to engage members in productive co-inquiry for some larger purpose. These sites have made use of digital tools to replicate lived-world social interactions so that participants can engage in meaningful communication on these sites. For example, Apple’s new synchronous video tool ISight™, a small video camera that attaches to computer monitors so that users can see and hear each other in real time, serves to mimic more of the embodied face-to-face interaction that occurs in lived-world contexts.

If designed effectively, these online sites can serve to foster learning through use of reflection and exchange of ideas. For example, in one study, students were compared on patterns of communication found in both face to face and computer mediated group problem solving. (Jonassen & Kwon, 2001). Results indicated that the computer mediated group had to make greater effort to communicate to other group members, but that their efforts to communicate and ability to reflect afforded more opportunities for critical thinking and therefore satisfaction with the course. In fact it took six days to complete the group assignments in computer conferencing environment while the face-to-face group completed the same task in about one hour. The computer-mediated environment afforded the opportunity to reflect leading to understanding of the course content.

At the same time, there are limitations to online exchanges. Synchronous (real-time) interactions can often be a challenge for learners in terms of being able to keep up with other participants or knowing what are relevant topics in the conversation. In some cases, chats can often be superficial and lacking purpose without some larger goal or outcome. And, people may lack the ready access or high-speed connections to participate with high levels of engagement.

Digital media tools. Digital media tools can therefore be used to fostering learning by providing for new ways to construct texts and to communicate with others. For example, hypermedia functions as a tool by combining hypertext (texts linked together by multi-linear nodes) and multimedia (photos, video, art, audio, text, etc.) to produce an interactive media experience for participants (Jonassen, 2000; Landow, 1997). Storyspace TM, HyperStudioTM, HyperCardTM, and various web authoring programs, involves defining intertextual links between a range of different text genres (McKillop & Myers, 1999; Myers & Beach, 2001; Myers, Hammett & McKillop, 1998; 2000). For example, high school students represented their experiences with peers through combining photos, music, video clips, and texts to interpret short stories (Beach & Myers, 2001).

Bolter and Grusin (1998) argues that hypermedia challenges the traditional emphasis in literacy instruction on understanding or producing unified, coherent texts based on a definitive, single perspective. He calls for teaching a "rhetoric of expectations and arrivals" (p. 10) that helps students understand where certain links may take them and how they should respond to where they arrive.

Students may often use these tools to simply employ a describing strategy as opposed to an interrogating strategy. In one study, 16 seventh graders 18 preservice teachers used StorySpaceTM to combine original poems, images, and Quicktime movies to explain the various literacy devices used in poetry (McKillop & Myers, 1999). The types of links employed in the hypermedia productions were analyzed in terms of their functions—an “iconic function” was used to illustrate another text, an “indexical function” was used to extend a text to show shared meaning, and a “symbolic function” was used to question the meaning of a text which resulted in a greater understanding of or a critical analysis of a text. Most of the seventh graders’ links served as iconic illustrations of ideas in poems. There were far fewer instances of links reflecting critical analysis, for example, when students juxtaposed texts to generate contested meanings. The undergraduates were more likely to employ links serving a “symbolic function” that involved critical analysis of texts.

Ninth graders at State College Area High School used of a range of hypermedia tools to contextualize issues associated with peer relationships (Beach & Myers, 2001). For example, one student, Abby, studied peer groups in the high school by taking digital photos of groups in action during the school day. Using Adobe PhotoshopTM she edited these images to grayscale and colorized specific objects that signified group belonging or exclusion. As she notes:

“In one of my photographs there are a bunch of bottles sitting on a table in the cafeteria. One bottle is differently shaped and colored that the rest. This is meant to show that there is one girl at my lunch table who doesn’t fit with our group. She doesn’t drink Snapple like the rest of the girls, which capitalizes on the fact that she doesn’t fit in. One of the most striking pictures is one of four girls all wearing the same style of Old Navy Tech Vest in the hallway outside of the bathroom. They are talking and laughing, and are obviously very comfortable together. . . My favorite picture is one of a group of girls standing together in the bathroom. This represents something that I call “the bathroom group”. The bathroom group is an objective group that consists of pretty much anyone who comes into the bathroom to socialize. Every girl in there is from a different group, and yet the girls all mingle and talk. This is one of the best examples of an objective group because, although I know this sounds odd, no one is judged in the bathroom.’” (Beach & Myers, 2001, p. 117).

Through her hypermedia project, she documents the ways in which female adolescents move in and out of different peer group worlds, adopting identities consistent with the rules or beliefs operating in these worlds.

In their study of their video game playing, Justin and Brett noted that many young players of video games construct future possible identities through play:

…sometimes a young child will fantasize about being the basketball player or soccer star that they are controlling in the video game, and they will learn to love and idolize that player for the rest of their life. That is a way that video games shape a person’s dreams or identities. (Beach & Myers, 2001, p. 176).

In a project on the characteristics of effective versus less effective romantic relationships, five ninth grade State College girls-Alyssa, Audra, Amanda, Kim, and Alissa, created a video drama portraying couples’ different beliefs about romance. In her essay about the video, Alyssa explained:

“The relationships each portray their own set beliefs and morals. . .The difference is that the good couple communicated with each other. They also had organized places they could go where they could be together outside of school. The bad couple never communicated and they didn’t go out with each other that much.” (Beach & Myers, 2001, p. 141)

To explore the ways in which the ideologies or discourses of sports define adolescent identities, State College student, Stephanie, created a Quicktime video containing a montage of images from magazines that portrayed how the media represents ways in which participation in sports is shown as marking one’s identity in a peer group or community. As she explains:

“For my final project I used the computer and scanned in pictures and added music to it. The social world I was portraying was sports teams while linking it to the social world of friends. In my final project I chose all the images from magazines for a purpose. I went through tons of magazines before I found them. . .When you play on a sports team one thing you should expect is for people to cheer for you and give you team spirit at your games. The very first image of the fans in the crowd was chosen because not only do you become friends with your team but you become friends with the fans as well. Every ones dream and desire is to win their game they are playing. One of my pictures fitted this thought. This picture was of a baseball player sitting on the shoulders of his teammates because he won the game.’” (Beach & Myers, 2001, p. 99).

Students also use digital tools to define hypertext links to information about traditions or historical developments, allowing them to contextualize current practices in a world or system based on past developments. Middle school students used Storyspace™ (Bolter, Smith, & Joyce, 1990) to construct hypertexts based on research on American history and culture (Patterson, 2000). See ACE Online.

For example, in writing a collaborative story about a slave captured in Africa, the students created hypertext narratives with links to information about slavery. In using Storyspace™ a hypertext authoring tool published by Eastgate Software for making these hypertext links, students went beyond just presenting information about people and events to understanding people and events as shaped by historical and cultural forces (Patterson, 2000)

As Patterson notes, working with StoryspaceTM shifted students away from simply rehashing information about persons to understanding people and events as shaped by historical and cultural forces. Fiction authors also use StoryspaceTM to create hypertext fiction organized around different optional storyline pathways similar to the “Choose Your Adventure” novels. Readers can select their own optional links to create their own story version. Readers click on certain words, phrases, or images to move to other links. There may be certain endings, but there is often no set pattern of links. This raises the issue of whether author’s can control their readers’ experiences in ways that foster an engaging narrative experience based on traditions of building suspense and inviting predictions of story resolutions. Greg Costikyan “Where Stories End and Games Begin” argues that this amounts to an inferior form of narrative:

Hypertext fiction lacks one of the key ingredients that makes games compelling; there is no goal for the reader, other than getting to a point where he or she "gets" the story. You're faced with a series of decisions--follow this path or that one--but there is no context for your decision. There is no reason, other than the desire to explore, to choose one path over another. Reading hypertext fiction, unlike playing a game, is purposeless exploration and does not produce the same sense of desire, of compulsion to "play." In other words, hypertext fiction is an unhappy compromise between traditional story and game. It's game-like in that the player has a variety of options, but not surprisingly, since it's created by people who by and large have little interest in games, it has few of the other aspects that make games appealing. Works of hypertext fiction are lousy games.

For examples of hypertext fiction see the Reading Room at Eastgate:

Click here for Robert Coover’s hypertext fiction

Digital tools are also used to create communities of learners who can share ideas and messages in on-line sites. The Inquiry Page housed at the University of Illinois is designed to help teachers share inquiry-based teaching units, teaching successes, and collective expertise (Bruce & Davidson, 1996; Bruce & Easley, 2000). Teachers engage in mutual inquiry through their access to resources on teaching and learning, articles, project links, curriculum units, and content resources. Users of the site are themselves the developers who
reconstruct the tool as they use it. Participants may also share video, photos, graphics, texts showing people engaged in inquiry in different settings and access resources involving a dynamic incorporation (using Digital Windmill) of the Open Directory category on Inquiry Based Learning.

This site represents new generation of web design that serves the social needs of teachers to mutually engage them in co-inquiry about problems, issues, or dilemmas. Research on uses of these sites indicates the importance of quality of the social interaction in this on-line co-inquiry. For example, Barah and Schatz (2001) analyzed the development of a web-based learning site designed to foster sharing of inquiry-instruction ideas by Indiana math and science teachers in terms of the components of evolving activity systems. This web site was initially designed as a tool by University educators to achieve the object of more discussion/sharing about inquiry instruction with the outcome being improved understanding of inquiry-based instruction. However, given the lack of participation, the University educators, along with teacher participants, shifted the focus of the web site to emphasize participants’ mutual collaboration at the site around inquiry-based math/science instruction.

This suggests the need for new, broader definitions of literacy and texts operating in schools. In this course, we will be using media literacy to include a range of different types of literacies involving understanding and producing texts. These include a range of practices involved in responding to and creating texts: film, television, radio, CD’s, DVD’s, music, the Web, e-mail, websites, hypermedia/PowerPoint productions, and print texts (magazines, novels, poems, etc.).

Each of these different types of texts requires the uses of particular types of literacies. For example, responding to and creating television involves the uses of “televisuality”—a set of literacies involving understanding and producing television images:

Students can use new media to explore issues in their life through multimedia productions about their everyday experience. For example, in a university-community collaborative after-school/summer program in Oakland, California, DUSTY—“Digital Underground Storytelling for Youth,” adolescents create and display multimedia digital stories consisting of a narrative with the author’s voice along with photographs, video, and
music (Hull, 2003).

Glynda Hull (2003) cites the example of a story by Randy:

“Lyfe-n-Rhyme.” “Mama’s only son is mama’s only gun with a guillotine tongue,” rang one rhythmic powerful line, as images of Randy and his mother morphed into photographs of the county jail, while the music of Miles Davis floated in the background. So proceeded Randy’s social critique and commentary on life and opportunity, or the lack thereof, in his city and country… One of the multi-media practices that is foregrounded in Randy’s
aforementioned piece is the recontextualization of images. The story has a remarkable opening in which several photographs are juxtaposed, including a sphinx and pyramids, Malcolm X, Tupac Shakur, Marcus Garvey, and Biggie Smalls, all icons that Randy chose to associate with himself and to transcend. By removing these images from their particular historical settings and re-purposing them within the context of his own creative universe and his own social world in Oakland, Randy demonstrated a very powerful authorial agency. This kind of compositional strategy is possible through alphabetic writing alone, but it can assume a special performative power and an aesthetic dimension through multimedia, at the same time that, as in Randy’s story, it relinquishes some of the precision of claim and evidence associated with traditional argumentation (p. 231)

Hull argues that these productions lead to rethinking traditions notions of literary operating in schools:

Thinking about multi-media composing like Randy’s story, other forms of technology-mediated popular culture, and examples of youth cultural performances such as spoken word and poetry slams can push us to think anew about theories of literacy. In the current context the old debates about orality and literacy, as well as long-held distinctions separating the personal and the analytic, seem
almost quaint in their dichotomous views, given the complex combinations, juxtapositions, and manipulations of spoken and written language and other semiotic systems and designs for meaning presently possible. There is much room, then, to explore and learn from the new formulations of literacy embodied in youth’s cultural performances (p. 232).

Module 2: Word document

Five Principles of New Media Production

Acquiring Literacies through the Use of New Media

Literacies Associated with Digital Media

One Example: Video Games as a New Media

Studying and Using the Web

Using the Web as a “Media Lab”: Working with Media Using the Internet

Building Learner-Centered Environments through Technology Integration

Creating a Webquest

What is a Webquest?

What are the Different Parts of a Webquest?

The Webquest Design Process

A Sample Webquest using Filamentality

Final Task: Creating Your Own Webquest

Web-based Resources for Teaching Media Literacy

Using Tappedin.org and Nicenet.org

Tappedin.org

Nicenet.org

References