Transliteracy – More thoughts

The more I consider this as a framework the more I like it.  For review purposes “transliteracy is the ability to read, write, and interact across a range of platforms, tools, and media from signing to orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio, and film to digital social networks” (p. 2)  It is the idea of moving both across literacies and beyond literacy – towards a “unifying ecology not just of media, but of all literacies relevant to reading, writing, interaction, and culture, both past and present” (p.2)

A unifying ecology – hooray!

Transliteracy offers a “wider analysis of reading, writing, and interacting [emphasis mine] across a range of platforms, tool, media and culture” (p.3).  It includes media literacy, digital literacy, and I’d venture to say information literacy as well.

One thing I like about it in terms of investigating the information practices of content creation is recognizes the concept of a life world -  which is “combination of the physical environment and subjective experience that makes up everyday life” (p. 5).  This is relevant in a number of ways – first information practice and content creation is not solely an online endeavor, there is a offline component, the contexts interact and build upon each other.  Separating the experience is a false dichotomy, both in the experiencing information and the creation process (even if the creating happens solely online such as building a website). “The characterization of transliteracy deliberately refuses to presuppose any kind of offline/online divide” (p. 9).

Second the concept of a lifeworld with its ’subjective’ experience gets at what I am referring to when I refer to a personal knowledge schema.  Although the individual experience is informed by the social nature of knowledge, each individual experiences, uses, analyzes, interprets the experience through the collection of previous knowledge therefore each individual’s knowledge is slightly different.  It is encouraging to have a name and theoretical definition for this.

The other thing transliteracy suggests is that it is not new literacies.  Affordances of new technologies allow us to engage in ‘old literacies’, including those that have been devalued by emphasis on text, in new ways.

The authors suggest that a transliterate analysis would look both at the how, and the why.  I am not currently fully exploring the why in a particular cultural sense, although I am in an individual sense in terms of motivation – which has cultural and social dimensions.

There are other considerations in terms of a transliterate analysis but what stands out is the “existence of a ‘group creativity’ or ‘intelligence’, perhaps as an emergent property of individual creativities or intelligences” (p. 9)  In recent interviews there emerged an issue regarding collaboration in terms of creation that was at odds within the individuals.  While sources of information/inspiration were often social – the learning process in particular – in creating when the process was collaborative there was conflict, a sense that one person should “own” the process.  While in the sense of distributed cognition many people own bytes of knowledge to collaborate to make a whole, in terms of creating there was a sense that one person should ‘own the vision’.  This conflicts with the examples of creation in this article but may be one of those things that emerges, that collaborating is a skill that may be underdeveloped in the teens creation process . . .

I will be continuing to revisit transliteracy and to expand my literature review.