Transcript Multimedia and Digital Literacy

MULTIMEDIA AND
DIGITAL LITERACY
ICS 139w
08/29/11
Assignment grading
• Bug in comments for Assignment 4
• Can talk to Dmitri (or myself) about scores
• Rewrites due Wednesday Midnight
• (email directly to Joel)
• Other questions?
Slide Peer Critiquing
• Look over your partner’s slides and fill out the critique
worksheet
• You do not have to give a full run of your presentation
• This is to check in and to get feedback on organization
and aesthetics
Media
• Q: What is media?
• A: The plural of “medium”: the means for doing something
• The channel used for communication
• The material used for art
• etc.
Communication Media
What methods / channels did you use to talk to people
since our last class?
Communication Media
• Face-to-Face
• Phone
• Skype
• Email
• Chat / Instant Message
• platform specific instances?
• Letters (“snail-mail”)
• Video Chat
• Actions
• Other?
Dimensions of a Medium
• Richness
• “rate and quality” of information conveyed—the bandwidth
• number of channels, language variety, feedback available
• Mass vs. individual
• Private vs. public
• Asynchronous vs. synchronous
• Recordable vs. ephemeral
“Beyond Being There”
• Hollan and Stornetta, 1992 (CHI)
“telecommunications research seems to work under the implicit
assumption that there is a natural and perfect state -- being there -and that our state is in some sense broken when we are not
physically proximate”
Can we have a medium that is better than face-to-face?
Multimedia
• Using more than one medium in communication
• Text + Images + Audio + Video + etc.
• How does multimedia
improve communication?
• How does multimedia
worsen communication?
http://singgiiihwordpresscom.typepad.com/blog/
Hypertext
• Hyperlinking as a form of multimedia
• Simple, early form of multimedia
• Embedding text in other text, rather than one medium in another
• Non-linear, interactive writing (c.f. PowerPoint)
• Contextualizes text
Memex
• Vannevar Bush, 1945, As We May Think
Information vs. Communication
Memex positions computers as information storage
systems, not as communication mediums
http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=internet+
information&word2=internet+communication
Consider:
• What are computers good at?
• What are people good at?
Digital Literacy
• “Digital literacy is the ability to find, evaluate, utilize, and
create information using digital technology.” (cornell.edu)
• Being able to use technology
• Navigate digital information
stores
• e.g., search the Internet and
find information
http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2010/11/what-digital-literacies.html
Why Digital Literacy?
• What do we mean by “literacy”?
• Sci-Fi: Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End (2006)
• An economy based on analyzing data
• “In almost all modern jobs, search and analysis are how we make
our living”
• c.f.: Mechanical Turk
Finding Information
• Search engines
• The power of the key word
• Guessing what other people
have written
• Appropriateness of resources
• Social Search
Scavenger Hunt!
• Work with a partner or individually
• Search for answers to questions on the Internet
• You will have 5 minutes – see how many you can
answer!
Scavenger Hunt Debrief
• How well did you do?
• What questions were hard / easy? Why?
• What strategies worked well?
• (is this exercise at all interesting?)
Information Reliability
• Source of information?
• Potential bias?
• Is information (or even Truth) socially constructed?
• http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/72347/july-31-2006/the-
word---wikiality
Contributing to the Knowledge Base
• Internet: communally defined information store.
• Contribute to information storage to help others in the
future
• Ethical responsibility to teach and inform
• Put your writing online!
• Benefits of collaborative writing (peer review)
Wikipedia
• One example of a knowledge base
• Reliability
• Search-ability
• Bias
Edit Wikipedia!
• Individually, look up one of your assignment topics in
Wikipedia. To to find:
• An error
• Something that isn’t clear
• Something that needs clarification
• Make a change to improve the entry
• You are empowered to contribute to the public knowledge
and to correct the mistakes of others.
• You have permission to add your input to collective knowledge
Conclusion
• Language and writing is a social process
• Information is socially constructed
• Writing is not just essays—variety of communication
mediums
• Value of written communication
• Recordable, translatable, standard
• Goal: effective and efficient communication
Homework
• Prepare presentation for Wednesday!
• Turn in slides to EEE by Tuesday 5pm
• Assignments 4/5 rewrites due Wednesday Midnight
• Email directly to Joel
• Can talk to us about scores on papers
• Dmitri for Assignment 4
• Joel for Assignment 5
Evaluations
• Take 5 minutes and fill out the EEE Evaluation
• What did you get out of this class?
• What worked; what didn’t work?
• What can I do to improve the class next year?
• (can also fill it out after class on Wednesday)