Henry Jenkins and good ol' Kress

Kress (2003) stresses that modern literacy requires the ability to express ideas across a broad
range of different systems of representation and signification (including “words, spoken or written;
image, still and moving;musical...3D models...”). Each medium has its own affordances, its
own systems of representation, its own strategies for producing and organizing knowledge.
Participants in the new media landscape learn to navigate these different and sometimes conflicting
modes of representation and to make meaningful choices about the best ways to express
their ideas in each context.All of this sounds more complicated than it is.As the New Media
Consortium’s 2005 report on twenty-first century literacy suggests,“Young people adept at
interpreting meaning in sound,music, still and moving images, and interactive components not
only seem quite able to cope with messages that engage several of these pathways at once, but
in many cases prefer them” (online source).
Kress argues that this tendency toward multimodality changes how we teach composition,
because students must learn to sort through a range of different possible modes of expression,
determine which is most effective in reaching their audience and communicating their message,
and to grasp which techniques work best in conveying information through this channel.
Kress advocates moving beyond teaching written composition to teaching design literacy as the
basic expressive competency of the modern era.This shift does not displace printed texts with
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images, as some advocates of visual literacy have suggested.Rather, it develops a more complex
vocabulary for communicating ideas that requires students to be equally adept at reading and
writing through images, texts, sounds, and simulations.The filmmaker George Lucas (Daly,
2004, online source/no page number) offers an equally expansive understanding of what literacy
might mean today:
We must teach communication comprehensively in all its forms.Today we work with the
written or spoken word as the primary form of communication. But we also need to
understand the importance of graphics,music, and cinema, which are just as powerful and
in some ways more deeply intertwined with young people’s culture.We live and work in a
visually sophisticated world, so we must be sophisticated in using all the forms of communication,
not just the written word.
In short, new media literacies involve the ability to think across media, whether understood at
the level of simple recognition (identifying the same content as it is translated across different
modes of representation), or at the level of narrative logic (understanding the connections
between story communicated through different media), or at the level of rhetoric (learning to
express an idea within a single medium or across the media spectrum).Transmedia navigation
involves both processing new types of stories and arguments that are emerging within a convergence
culture and expressing ideas in ways that exploit the opportunities and affordances
represented by the new media landscape. In other words, it involves the ability to both read and
write across all available modes of expression.

One of the major findings of my interviews is that digital story-making is an embodied learning experience. When I listened to the words they used, and to their comparisons between “traditional” assignments and digital story assignments, it appears that more of themselves is involved, physically and emotionally in addition to intellectually.

If life is like a box of chocolates, then
CLICK
Digital Storytelling is a lot like three dimensional tic-tac-toe
CLICK

As opposed to written assignments, which usually only involve effective use of text, successful stories challenge student to make connections (AND meaning AND effective arguments AND provocative statements) across dimensions of time, sound, and image.

Embodied: Combines visual, aural, and kinesthetic processes
Iterative: Production process encourages revisiting, reflecting on meaning
Multimodal: Enhances fluency across a range of media
Integrative: Connects prior experience, course, and other co-curricular learning
Authentic: Keep/share with others


Gail Matthews-DeNatale, Ph.D.
Associate Director, Academic Technology

“[Students] cannot learn in a deep way if they have no opportunities to practice what they are learning … they cannot learn deeply only by being told things outside the context of embodied action.”
JAMES PAUL GEE – What Video Games have to teach us about learning and literacy

Gee came to this conclusion by considering the experience of video gaming.

Yet digital authorship is also a complex, physical experience – one that includes most, if not all, of the “36 design principles” that Gee identified in his work on the relationship between games and learning. Yet we often gloss over this dimension of the experience.


Henry Jenkins – McArthur-funded New Media Literacies initiative
Play (experiment and problem-solve)
Performance (improvisation & discovery)
Collective Intelligence (pool & compare)
Simulate (model real-world processes)
Network (search, synthesize, disseminate