Join host Susan McKinnell and University of Minnesota guest experts as they discuss whether the three Rs have changed and what the new literacy is in this digital age.
Guests
Laura Gurak
Laura Gurak
Laura J. Gurak is a nationally recognized scholar in rhetoric and Internet research. She is a professor in and the head of the Department of Rhetoric at the University of Minnesota. Along with her colleague Dr. John Logie, she co-directs the Internet Studies Center. Gurak is also one of six non-law faculty members at the University to hold the title of Faculty Fellow in the Law School.
She received her Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1994. Her specialties include the rhetoric of technology, intellectual property, and Internet studies. She is the author of Cyberliteracy: Navigating the Internet with Awareness and Persuasion and Privacy in Cyberspace: The Online Protests over Lotus MarketPlace and the Clipper Chip. The latter was the first book-length study to document the rhetorical dynamics of online communication and one of the first to look at how protests form in cyberspace.
Nora Paul
Nora Paul
Nora Paul is the director of the Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota's School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Nora was with the Poynter Institute , a mid-career journalism training program in St. Petersburg, Florida, from 1991 to 2000. She held seminars in news library management, computer-assisted research, and new media leadership. She was editor for information services at the Miami Herald from 1979 to 1991.
Nora is the author of Computer Assisted Research: A Guide to Tapping Online Information, and co-author of Great Scouts: Cyber-Guides for Subject Searching on the Web and Behind the Message: Information Strategies for Communicators. Her work at the Institute for New Media Studies focuses on the impact of the new media environment on content, new story-telling forms, and the convergence of media operations. Nora has a masters degree in library science from Texas Woman's University. She is on the boards of the Online News Association and the Media Center at the American Press Institute.
For Your Files
Rhetoric Professor Laura Gurak said to be "literate" in this digital age it is useful to understand "hybrid register":
"If you look closely at a lot of e-mail, the punctuation is either missing or people are inserting things that they might otherwise do with speech, so we're getting what linguists are calling a 'hybrid register': a place where we have a mix of print and spoken forms. So if you're new to e-mail or someone's new to an online environment, this might seem strange to get something that looks like it's written but when you read it, sounds like it's being spoken."
To get more comfortable communicating online, Laura suggested:
"If you're just getting on e-mail or you're just learning about chats or something, . . . sort of pay attention for a little while before you join the discussion so you can see what the rules are. You know, humans have a natural ability to pick up language in its most subtle form, so if you watch for a little while you'll kind of understand what the different patterns are and so on."
Nora Paul, director of the University's New Media Studies Institute, discussed another literacy:
"Technology literacy, just in terms of understanding how messages are crafted and how different kinds of technologies are being used to deliver information to you, is also important. Understanding, for example, that visual images can be manipulated, and trying to understand how pure the source is and how many iterations it might have gone through before it got to you, is important."
Nora gave us a check list of items to consider when evaluating information online:
"First of all, I always say: find out who this person is that's telling you these things. Find out why they're telling you them. The fact that somebody has an agenda for giving you information is not a problem; it's only a problem if you don't know what that agenda is so you can put it into context. And then thirdly, how is it that they've come to know what they say they know? Check their facts and see if they're just pulling it out of thin air or if, in fact, they are a credible source because they have a legitimate way to know that this is true or not."
Links
You can get lists of abbreviations, text shorthand, and emoticons commonly used in e-mail, online chats/discussions, instant messages, and cell phone and PDA text on the following pages:
You can find out more about how to evaluate the credibility of online sources on the Quickstudy: Library Research Guide site from the University of Minnesota Libraries and the Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility page.
Hybrid Register
Any writing that is expressed as it would be in the spoken form, such as informal e-mail or chat.
Blog
Short for Web log, a blog is an online diary or frequently updated personal Web page.