The PLENK2010 readings this week point towards critical literacies and semiotics (skills as languages), and the challenge is that the facilitiators are providing less guidance by way of reading of how to connect the ideas to practices. That is left to us.
I say yay. Hooray. Huzzah.
Downes in LOLcats take 2 – about Learning in new media – illustrates the change in literacy on the net, and makes an argument for understanding skills as semiotic transactions in http://www.slideshare.net/Downes/speaking-in-lolcats-take-2 New media is a language. The Jenkins slides 34ff are the important ones here. The ground of PLE is stated in slide 41: when people construct artifacts they are constructing media with which to think < and old saw in comp/rhet. Slide 46 makes the link to critical literacies, when we ask, as good rhetoricians, about purposes, power, assumptions that inform and shape the communication. Objects communicate; they are semiotic artifacts, so these questions can be asked and answered by objects. How does the iPad serve the creators/sellers fundamental purpose? What assumptions are the designers making in their reasoning?
Downes takes a nice shot at Cialdini’s 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive with one arrow: Fallacious Tropes (slide 49). Consider what that book is going to look like: a scientific treatise? Consider who you have to be to take the book seriously because of the title’s claim. Consider the underlying assumptions the authors claim t build on by way of the title’s claim. One shot at that book becomes a killer shot at much of olde worlde educational thinking that is scientifically proven.
Downes: The concept of personal learning is that there is no teacher.
Hang around and skim the related slide shares: http://www.slideshare.net/Downes/connectivism-in-practice-critical-thinking-as-a-distributed-course, and http://www.slideshare.net/Downes/pedagogical-foundations-for-personal-learning.
What this means, then, is Study Social Semiotics. Now. Read Kress. We speak in artifacts and need to learn the appropriate languages.
To do: Create an exercise for a PLE learner that might allow him or her to link a critical literacy premise with an artifact that illustrates that premise, just as Downes does in LOLcats. Then do that exercise yourself.