Making, Doing, and then Knowing:

1. Making, Doing, and then Knowing: Encountering Electracy Sarah J. Arroyo California State University, Long Beach

2. Digital Literacy • Critiquing Content • Evaluating Content • Working with Search Engines • Navigating through information • Reading “vertically”; “reading” multimedia content; still interacting with print • Customizing On-line experiences • Creating Identities

3. Digital Literacy • Makes us feel at home in digital culture • Allows us to consume information appropriate to our needs • Gives room for greater participation • Serves as a necessary counterpart to “computer literacy” • Emphasizes, knowing, doing, and then making • Allows us to hone database thinking

4. Merging Digital Literacy With Electracy A Focus on Making

5. The students are helping to invent the future of writing. This attitude and relationship to learning has to be made explicit and encouraged, since students are unaccustomed to working in an experimental way. Gregory Ulmer, Internet Invention

6. Knowing: Theoretical Knowledge Doing: Practical Knowledge Making: Productive Knowledge

7. Electracy All the practices used to conduct schooling are relative to the apparatus of literacy. In the history of human culture there are but three apparatuses: orality, literacy, and now electracy. We live in the moment of the emergence of electracy, comparable to the two principal moments of literacy (The Greece of Plato, and the Europe of Galileo). Gregory Ulmer “What is Electracy?” http://www.nwe.ufl.edu/elf/electracy.html

8. Electrate Apparatus Orality, literacy, and electracy are all part of an apparatus. An apparatus, according to Greg Ulmer, is “the matrix of a language machine, partly social and partly technological, that operates in a given epoch. An apparatus is not only a technology (e.g. the alphabet, paper, ink, etc.) but also an institution and its practices developed along with the technology.”

9. Electracy Electracy is to computing what literacy is to print. A language apparatus is a social machine consisting of three dimensions: technology, institution, and human identity formation. Schooling in its entire history--from Plato’s Academy to the modern public school--represents the institutionalization of the alphabet as a technology. Gregory Ulmer “What is Electracy?” http://www.nwe.ufl.edu/elf/electracy.html

10. We are inventing electracy. Electracy does not already exist as such, but names an apparatus that is emerging ‘as we speak,’ rising in many different spheres and areas, and converging in some unforeseeable yet malleable way.” Gregory Ulmer, Internet Invention

11. Electracy Electracy emphasizes a multiplicity of meanings for any one concept, supports imagination, and encourages creativity and invention: all of which are traditionally not valued in a university environment built upon analytics.

12. We are moving from an economy and a society built of the logical, linear, computerlike capabilities of the Information Age to an economy and a society built of the inventive, empathetic, big picture capabilities of what’s rising in its place, the Conceptual Age. Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind

13. Skills for The Conceptual Age • Recognizing Patterns • Establishing Connections • Combining seemingly unrelated ideas into something new • Employing not only analysis but synthesis: the ability to combine disparate pieces into an arresting new whole

14. For nearly a century, Western society in general, and American society in particular, has been dominated by a form of thinking and an approach to life that is narrowly reductive and deeply analytical.Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind

15. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind – creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers Big Picture Thinkers

16. Design – that is, utility enhanced by significance – has become an essential aptitude for personal fulfillment and professional success. Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind

17. Heuretics A heuretic pedagogy focuses on production (design), and on not always being strictly tied to the notion that, in order to teach or learn something, we first have to master it. Loosely defined, heuretics allows us to understand something while also participating in its invention. The logic of heuretics emerges through writing when writers construct patterns from disassociated parts. These patterns are not known in advance and emerge through the writing itself. Recognizing a pattern as it is occurring drives invention.

18. Heuretic Pedagogy Heuretic pedagogy has become a staple in any course I teach, from undergraduate courses in Composition, multimedia writing and teaching Composition to graduate seminars in critical theory. I insist that students respond to the issues raised in readings and class discussions through various media. On-the-spot production allows for little contemplation, but requires thinking by way of association and immediate participation in networked culture.

19. Examples Responses made in response to Shirley Turkle’s “Identity Crisis” • Drama • Bullitt • Bullitt Remix Response made in response to Howard Rheingold’s “Smart Mobs: The Power of the Mobile Many” • Smart Mobs? And… • Macbeth Wars

20. Heuretic Pedagogy The best thing about teaching heuretically is that possibilities remain open. By requiring both a hermeneutic understanding of a course reading and a heuretic production, for example, we allow students to participate in the reading by making something from it. And in order to make something, students have to infiltrate the collective practices emerging from the network in which they are participating.

21. Affinity Spaces Fans of an original work like Harry Potter create new stories based on the characters and settings of the original http://www.ctwebspace.com/671/oldvnewschool/affinity.html#affinity Banning MySpace http://www.ctwebspace.com/671/oldvnewschool/ban.html Video http://www.ctwebspace.com/671/oldvnewschool/index.html

22. The Net Generation • Different Expectations for reading and writing • They read and write all the time; social relationships are constructed through writing and participating in on-line culture • http://www.ctwebspace.com/671/oldvnewschool/netgeners.html

23. What Can We Do? • Three Suggestions • Place more value on immediate making, or design and production • Require participation in online communities • Look for examples of Conceptual Age-type reasoning • YouTube • Insight and InnoCentive

24. What Do You Do?What Can You Do?What Would You Do? • Practicing Heuretics • Heuretic Assignments • Web 2.0 and Community • MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Wikis • Making Movies