Metaliteracy, Megaliteracy and Information Literacy!

Last week our local colleges and universities held a conference around METALITERACY.   Transliteracy has a partner--metaliteracy.  Reaction panel member, Richard Fogarty (History, University at Albany) shared that meta means "larger" or what comes after, and that is where our conversation finds us.  After years of talking about "transliteracy," the literacy ecosystem has evolved to metaliteracy.   This is a large habitat that is not endangered. As an afternoon reaction panel member, I had the opportunity of sharing the K-12 College and Career Readiness piece of this conversation.  Whether we are working in the K-12 environment or higher education, we are all in the same boat.  The learners of the 21st Century are not those of the 1960's and our pedagogy must include adaptations.   

I created this infographic to summarize the day's conversation and encourage educators at all levels to understand this paradigm shift.  If you need to know more, follow the links on the infographic to Metaliteracy.org  or create your own local PLC to uncover and discover what this is all about and embrace this in your information literacy instruction. 

Reading Redefined ?

Captive on a five hour flight, shackled in an ever-shrinking airplane seat, I had a chance to catch up on journals and find a few gems hidden within the pile of paper.  One of the best articles I've read recently was Annette Lamb's  Reading Redefined for a Transmedia Universe.    Thanks to ISTE for offering this via the web! 

This article does a great job of explaining where the print world is headed to accommodate our transliterate alien culture.  If you are looking for a good read to fill-in-the-blanks on eReading as well as peek at the future evolution eBooks, take the time to study every paragraph in this article on alien print formats you may encounter. 

I found it especially interesting when she concludes the article with the caveats in a quagmire world of muddling fact, fiction and misinformation.  This is clearly exemplified in the last section with the heading New Opportunities, New Challenges.  Lamb says, "Traditional fiction is a representation that is invented or imaginary and not factual....  But what happens when you're in a fictional augmented or alternative reality world, but working with non-fiction materials? Or, when you're in the real world working with fictional materials?  Or, when authors develop websites that are intended to be misleading or deceptive? ... Spaceheadz by  Jon Sciszka is advertised as a work of fiction...however the book also contains pages with factual information about topics such as sound waves and electromagnetic fields.  To make it ever more complicated, links within the story take the reader to websites with fake content such as the Mrs. Halley's Comets, and Anti-alien Agency...."  

So, in addition to new transliterate formats, we need to pay attention to mixed credibility resources.

For those who haven't heard about transliteracy and the reading revolution-- take the time to think about it.  Reading is no longer two dimensional, chronological, black and white, top-down, left-right.  Reading is now multi-dimensional and multi-mediums.
(See previous blog postings on transliteracy:

Librarydoor: All's a Buzz Over Transliteracy...

Librarydoor: What is transliteracy and are you addressing it?
Librarydoor: More on Transliteracy )

The real message is that librarians need to insure we are preparing our 21st Century students well to discern the credible truth.  We no longer should just teach fact, fiction & opinion-- but rather teach fact, fiction, opinion and misinformation.  My space helmet off to Annette!  

The Transliterate Learner & Common Core

We have PD  tomorrow for 100 teacher-librarian teams.  I've created this "Spicynode" on the Transliterate Learner to demo one tech tool. This was one tool recommended by the AASL 25 Best Websites for Teaching and Learning team. Thank you team members for your excellent choices! We have had tremendous feedback from educators as we share these gems such as Spicynodes.org 

As Pam Berger says, technology should be taught with inconsequential content.  That way, when there's important content, the technology will be transparent.  This Web tool, Spicynodes, has a little learning curve, and is an example where you would want this to be taught with inconsequential data.   A teacher could ask their students to create one of these at the beginning of the school year to "tell me about you."   Or, share via a Spicynode, what you like to read.   After a simple homework assignment such as that, your students could use this for a knowledge product later in the year, and the tech tool would be transparent. 
 
(GenY Image from centralitymedia.com)

Speeding Tickets for Millennials ?

There's a paradigm shift occurring and communication is no longer B & W print. (See my blog on reading evolution.) Students are skimming and scanning at warp speed--sometimes successfully and other times in error.  They are listening, watching, gathering, consolidating messages, concluding, reading and reacting.  

I often believe that millennials are operating in an entertainment mode whenever they hold a digital device.  I content that they have spend so much time trying to beat electronic games, that their MO online has fostered this fast-paced transient operation online.  Therefore, we educators have a big issue to deal with as students lack:

• Patience
• Persistence, and
• Focus

That is the profile of the transliterate generation. That is the educational issue of today.   While books such as iBrain, by Gary Small M.D. do a good job of convincing us that the millennials are equipped to assess some aspects of online credibility correctly, and think outside the box,  I believe that the transliterate generation must slow down and grab hold of a few metacognitive warnings.  (The book is good and well recommended, BTW.)  The Common Core requires us to embrace teaching models of rigor and complex text, yet our students do not have the habits of mind to embrace this.  Guess what: They need to be told that. The first step in solving a problem is recognizing that you have one. 
We are busy building a lexicon of the discipline and doing action research to determine whether students succeed more when they are specifically instructed to: 

• Stop--Time - Out
• Slow down
• Put on your magnifying glass and act like a lawyer.

Try it yourself.  By doing a simple EQ investigation on learning habits of the millennials, the students themselves will come up with their own notorious impairments. [EQ: What are the characteristics of Millennials online and how might that impact your achievement?] Then, they might be ready to learn about metacognition.  After they are aware of this new learning MO in the library or classroom, I actually suggest you should give out speeding tickets from time to time.  If a student is caught in a wrong MO, drawing wrong conclusions, award a speeding ticket.  I'll let you determine the consequences.  

We joke locally about the habits of the online Millennials.  They usually fit into one of these categories:

• retreivers -- (hide 'n seek)
• spiders (crawling all around)
• Ants (piling it all up)
• Super-Squirrels, or
• Bee's - flying all over. 

What we really need are K-9's!  We need students who know the task at-hand and attack it and don't quit until they find what they were looking for.  They don't get distracted by imposters and scrutinize the area they are told to investigate.  How many classes can we get to operate that way?   

My late grandmother used to say, "Everyone's business is nobody's business."  Let's all work together to remedy this ailment...one class at a time.  For additional ideas on reaching transliterate students, see my article in this month's Library Media Connection (LMC) issue. 

All's a Buzz Over Transliteracy...

Transliteracy has been evolving for thousands of years. It just did not have a name until about 2005. So, now that educators are trying to figure out why students habits have changed, they are all scrambling to diagnose the problem, find a cure, prescribe some medicine and go back to the original form. It won't happen. 

 I like to think of transliteracy as the ecosystem of literacy.  Someone said transliteracy was the ecosystem of information literacy, but I think literacy alone is more accurate.  When you grasp that analogy, you almost have it. 



Just as the Gutenberg press changed the direction of literacy, the evolution of technology and mobile devices has also redefined reading, communication, and knowledge content and collaboration. The literacy umbrella now embraces communication the melds ancient modes and digital codes into a recipe for millennial success. (Read http://tinyurl.com/ykchfpj  to fully understand the evolution of reading and sociological change -- this is an article which summarizes the book)


Educators should embrace this change, need to embrace this change, and must embrace this change for optimal success. Our world has changed--if you deny that, you remain in the past and will be out-done by your younger colleagues. (However, the younger colleagues could learn a thing or two about manners, humility, and ethics from the more mature....)


How do we embrace transliteracy and yet keep rigor in our curriculum? The CCSS does a good job of defining the collaborative nature of pedagogy. Students need to:
* be driven by a research question

* solve real-world problems, aligned with curriculum content

* embed technological working platforms

* be given ample opportunity to express (and write) in varying formats including media, original content, debate, authentic writing experiences, and more. Attend a good INQUIRY based learning professional development session and you will walk away with another recipe for success. 
Caveat: Just because one becomes digitally literate, does not mean that person is transliterate. I believe the person who is digitally literate (or mobile literate) still needs to understand. No longer is "reading" enough. We must be able to find meaning and react to the information -- to complete the cycle. Literacy now includes understanding, just as reading scores included comprehension.  It is not enough to be digitally literate. Therefore, thinking critically is now part of the equation.I will be presenting at NYLA this November in Saratoga Springs on this topic. Perhaps you will attend and get a few concrete tips for instructional application.

Here is my favorite Transliteracy quotes:
Transliteracy is a mix of: “inherited conventions and recent inventions, expectations and improvisations.” Alan Liu, thank you.

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More on Transliteracy

      While speaking with a colleague today, I was amazed at the lack of confidence the Boomer generation has in themselves.  They believe they are technologically behind the Millennials and will never catch up.  I beg to differ.   In actuality, the Millennials trying to find info on the Internet is akin to trying to drink from a fire hydrant.  
      We Boomers on the other-hand, may not be technologically savvy, but we are information literate (for the most part).  We can spot bias, assess whether an article is credible, we take the time to read the list of annotations before we click (we "pick, don't click").   We were raised to evaluate resources and took time to read them.  This generation doesn't evaluate them, let alone read them carefully.  
In steps TRANSLITERACY.   As Boomers become more technologically savvy, their skills will exceed the Millennials because they are transliterate.  We can take our literacy and translate it onto a new medium.  We can transfer our information literacy to a different operating platform.   We can readily ascertain whether a website or article is Credible Accurate, Reliable or Supported.  

      Give yourself more credit and show those young'ens a thing or two.  Have them visit http://www.wisegeek.com/  and ask whether the info is valid or credible.  How do they know.  Scroll down to the bottom and look for the authorship.  Ask them what they think about that corporate ownership name? 

What is transliteracy and are you addressing it?

Here is a short video intended to make you think. 
I like to say -- get on the train, or you'll be run over on the track!
It is imperative we teach our students to transfer knowledge to any medium.