Mark Warschauer
Professor of Education and Informatics
email: [email protected]
phone: (949) 824-2526
office: 3225 Education
twitter: http://twitter.com/markwarschauer
Professor of Education and Informatics
email: [email protected]
phone: (949) 824-2526
office: 3225 Education
twitter: http://twitter.com/markwarschauer
Go to the first half of this chapter
Electronic Literacies and School Reform
Controversies over electronic literacies is taking place in the midst of broader societal struggles over the nature of literacy and schooling.
In many U.S. shools, the technocratic paradigm of literacy that emerged after World War II continues to dominate today. Literacy is viewed as a series of discrete functional skills which can be taught through isolated technocratic methods. Yet this skill-based approach has come under attack.
In a widely-publicized critique of functional literacy, E. D. Hirsch (1987) noted that many students today neither read with much understanding nor have much general knowledge about important historical or current events. Hirsch issued a call for cultural literacy as a proposed alternative to functional literacy. And over the years he has published a series of books detailing exactly what elements of cultural knowledge students of particular grades should know, including names of particular historical figures and dates of historical events.
Though championed by conservative politicians such as William Bennet (Secretary of Education in the second Reagan administration), Hirsch's views have earned broad criticism from educators who see his perspective as out of date with the realities of the 20th century, let alone the 21st. As Tuman (1992) explains,
The essential historical shift behind Hirsch's analysis was from a mercantile, pre-industrial world where wealth (and, by extension, culture) resulted from the accumulation of land and surplus goods (the economic equivalents of Hirsch's lists of cultural information) to a capitalist, industrial world where wealth (and culture) resulted from the systematic application of technological innovation. At the center of modern educational reform that Hirsch so opposes is the realization that, as industrial production replaced domestic economy in the nineteenth century, it was no longer enough to know what one's parents or one's fellow citizens knew (p. 30).
The problems of both the functional literacy and cultural literacy approaches are illuminated by Robert Reich's (1991) in-depth analysis of society and education in the informational era . Reich 's research shows that the vast majority of jobs in developed countries in the current era fall into three categories: routine-production services (e.g., data processors, payroll clerks, factory workers), in-person services (e.g., janitors, hospital attendants, taxi drivers), and symbolic analyst services (e.g., software engineers, management consultants, strategic planners). The income, status, and opportunities for workers in the first two categories are continually diminishing, whereas symbolic analysts command a disproportionate and rising share of the wealth in the U.S. and other countries. What's more, symbolic analysts do work which is enjoyable and personally rewarding, whereas those in routine-production and in-person services do work which (post-Fordist management techniques notwithstanding) is too often dreary and dull.
Reich analyzes the educational experiences of symbolic analysts, which usually take place in either elite private schools or high-quality suburban schools followed by good four-year colleges. Such education focuses on neither the development of basic functional skills nor the accumulation of facts:
Budding symbolic analysts learn to read, write, and do calculations, of course, but such basic skills are developed and focused in particular ways. They often accumulate a large number of facts along the way, yet these facts are not central to their education; they will live their adult lives in a world where most facts learned years before (even including some historical ones) will have changed or have been reinterpreted. In any event, whatever data they need will be available to them at the touch of a computer key (p. 229).
Reich goes on to explain that in America's best schools and colleges, the curriculum is "fluid and interactive" (p. 230). Instead of emphasizing the transmission of information, the focus is on judgment and interpretation. Students are taught to get behind the data, to examine reality from many angles, and to visualize new possibilities and choices. The symbolic-analytic mind "is trained to be skeptical, curious, and creative" (p. 230). This involves an education which is based on abstraction, system thinking, experimentation, and collaboration. Students learn to "articulate, clarify, and then restate for one another how they identify and find answers" (p. 233). They learn how to "seek and accept criticism from peers, solicit help, and give credit to others" (p. 233). They also learn to "negotiate--to explain their own needs, to discern what others need and view things from others' perspectives, and to discover mutually beneficial resolutions" (p. 233). All of this prepares them for their future careers, in which they will "spend much of their time communicating concepts--through oral presentations, reports, designs, memoranda, layouts, scripts, and projections--and then seeking a consensus to go forward with the plan" (p. 233).
Reich's analysis lays bare the weaknesses of both the functional literacy and cultural literacy perspectives and indicates the types of literacy practices which are necessary to prepare students for full participation in society.
These three educational models naturally have different visions of the role of technology in the schools. In the functional literacy paradigm, the computer is a device for delivering instructional drills. The computer supplements the teacher and workbook by offering individualized lessons to assist students develop basic competencies in areas such as grammar, spelling, and reading comprehension. These lessons are referred to as either "drill-and-practice" or, more pejoratively, as "drill-and-kill." Thus the computer becomes a vehicle for literacy (albeit of a limited scope), but does not itself become a medium of literacy practices. Or, in some cases computing itself becomes one of the skills to be taught. In this case, students might be brought to the computer lab once a week and taught various "computer skills," such as the operation of basic programs. But without reference to any other meaningful content, goals, purposes, or tasks, such "computer literacy" does little to enhance broader literacy skills. As Neil Postman (1993) put it, there are "no 'great computerers,' as there are great writers, painters, or musicians." Or, as Michael Bellino, another critic of school computing, stated, "Tools come and tools go....The purpose of schools is to teach carpentry, not hammer" (Oppenheimer, 1997, p. 62).
Hirsch's vision of cultural literacy dismisses the role of the computer in education entirely. The only direct reference to computers in Hirsch's (1987) book suggests that literacy and technological change are opposing cultural forces: "The more computers we have, the more we need shared fairy tales, Greek myths, historical images, and so on" (p. 31). Thus, as Tuman (1992) has noted, Hirsch sees computers as part of a more general movement in culture to increased specialization, and therefore are part of the disease for which broad cultural literacy training is the antidote. Hirsch ignores the role that computerized databases could play (and are playing) in providing the kinds of facts, figures, and linked background information that he feels is so important, and he of course doesn't ponder the effects on cultural literacy of being bound in a print-based world when the rest of the culture is increasingly communicating in an electronic medium (see discussion in Bolter, 1991).
Finally, any educational program which sought to implement Reich's educational goals of abstraction, system thinking, experimentation, and collaboration would clearly have modern technology integrated in as a central component. But, unlike in the functional literacy approach, the computer would not be relegated to imparting basic skills, nor would it be seen as a skill in itself. Rather it would be one of a number of tools that students would learn to use as they engage in authentic and collaborative experiments, projects, and analyses.
Though Reich has not put forward a detailed educational model, the kind of project-based interactive education that he proposes has been elaborated by other educators (e.g., Bayer, 1990; Tharp & Gallimore, 1988; Wells & Chang-Wells, 1992). In fact, such a model of collaborative learning is broadly promoted in U.S. colleges of education, though to the extent that it is actually practiced in schools, especially outside of wealthy and upper-middle class neighborhoods, is open to question (see discussion in Cummins & Sayers, 1995).
Electronic Literacies and (In)Equality
The last issue I would like to look at, and one which will be particularly important for this book, is the complex relationship of electronic literacies to (in)equality in society and in education. This relationship encompasses two contradictory factors: on the one hand, the Internet represents the most diversified mass medium the world has ever known, potentially allowing greater numbers of people than ever before to put forth their views and publish their message. On the other hand, the cost of using personal computers, the language used on the Internet, and other exclusive factors mean that the medium is thus far dominated by a relatively wealthy elite, with most of the world's people shut out from using it at all.
Manuel Castells (1996) analyzes both sides of this contradiction, placing the development of the Internet within the more general trend of control and diversification of mass media. Thus while television, radio, and newspapers are coming under the control of smaller numbers of corporations and governments, they are also diversifying their programming over a plethora of channels, networks, and stations. There is thus an evolution from a mass society to a segmented society, with the audience increasingly fragmented by ideologies, values, tastes, and lifestyles. As Castells points out, "while the media have indeed globally intraconnected, and programs and messages circulate in the global network, we are not living in a global village, but in customized cottages globally produced and locally distributed" (p. 341).
However, this diversification of the media remained unidirectional?with individuals receiving more and more diverse raw material, but not producing it?until the development of the Internet. The Internet is more exclusive than other media (such as television, radio, or newspapers) due to the cost, education, and language requirements necessary to access it. But it is even more diversified than other media in that it allows for not dozens of communication channels, but millions, as each individual user potentially becomes an author and producer.
The Internet had its initial roots among a small number of well-educated, relatively affluent, and mostly male computer users in the United States. It has branched out rapidly to larger numbers of users, but its usage still remains skewed by gender, wealth, and nationality. Within the United States, two 1995 surveys of Internet users found that 67% were male and that 65% were affluent, with the median household income of all users at $62,000 (Castells, 1996). Internationally, the Internet remains dominated by users in the United States and, secondarily, other industrialized countries (see table 1).
Table 1
Geographic Distribution of Internet Host Computers
________________________________________________________________________
Country or Region Percent of World's Internet Host Computers
________________________________________________________________________
United States 60.5%
Western Europe 20.7%
Japan 4.9%
Australia and New Zealand 4.4%
Canada 3.5%
Eastern Europe and former Soviet Union 2.1%
Asia and Pacific (excluding Japan, Australia, and New Zealand) 1.9%
Latin America 0.9%
Africa 0.6%
Middle East (excluding North Africa) 0.4%
________________________________________________________________________
Note. Based on Network Wizard's Internet host domain information for July 1997 (http://www.nw.com/)
Access in developing countries remains rare. For example, Latin America and Africa each have less than 1% of all the world's Internet sites (see table 1). Yet even these figures don't reveal the full inequality. For example, fully 98% of Africa's sites are located in a single country (South Africa), leaving the entire rest of the continent with fewer connections to the Internet than a single good-sized university in the United States. Similarly, 88% of the Internet sites in the Middle East are located in Israel.
The poor in developing countries are not likely to get online soon, as some 80% of the world's population lacks the basic telecommunications facilities (let along computers) necessary for Internet access (Panos Institute, 1995). The elite in developing countries will of course have better access, but they will still be confronted by a situation in which the overall content and direction of the Internet is largely shaped in California and New York rather than in their own country (Schiller, 1996; Wresch, 1996).
At the same time, the many millions who do get online experience a medium dramatically more democratic in many ways than other media or communication channels. First, the Internet allows instantaneous access to vast amounts of information. This is particularly important in developing countries, where resources are scant for international journal subscriptions, newly-published books, and other print resources. Scholars, students, and entrepeneurs in these countries can often get access to types of information online that would have been beyond their reach otherwise (see for example Rich & De Los Reyes, 1995). Second, and equally importantly, the Internet allows these millions of users to initiate communication and provide content, rather than just receive it, whether by sending a simple e-mail message or creating of a web site.
This contradiction?between the Internet as a medium of exclusion or a voice of pluralism?is well illustrated by the use of languages on the Internet. On the one hand, a 1997 study showed that fully 82% of the Web pages in the world were in English (Cyberspeech, 1997). This is partly a result of the Internet's being born in the United States and still dominated by users in that country, and partly a result of the general dominance of English as a language of international communication in academic, business, and entertainment spheres (Kachru & Nelson, 1996; Pennycook, 1995). Indeed, by creating more channels for global communication, and thus a need for a lingua franca, the Internet is likely to strengthen the dominance of English as a global language (The Coming Global Tongue, 1996). At the same time, the "narrowcasting" multi-channel feature of the Internet means that it can allow communication in hundreds or thousands of languages at the same time. This is already evidenced by the amount of discussion on Internet bulletin boards in a great variety of languages (Paolilo, 1997). The result might be that people use English on the Internet for certain instrumental reasons, and other languages or dialects to fulfill other social and cultural needs (Joseph Lo Bianco, personal communication, January 14, 1997). As a result, the main impact of the Internet "is likely to be to protect subsidiary languages," rather than to endanger them (The Coming Global Tongue, 1996, p. 78). Indeed, speakers of several Native American and other endangered indigenous languages have started to make use of the Internet's capacity to connect isolated groups of small numbers of speakers and to allow low-cost archiving and publishing of indigenous language materials as a way to promote language maintenance and revitalization. Of course the potential of the Internet to protect minority languages is no guarantee that this will actually occur, since the fulfillment of that potential depends on access to technological resources which may or may not be available, as well as the commitment of a community to continue valuing its own language when more and more of the world's informational resources are being made available in English.
A recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald (Jopson, 1997) provided a concrete example of the contradictory nature of the Internet for economically and politically marginalized groups The article discusses ways that Aboriginal groups in Australia are using the Internet to promote their culture and express themselves politically. One aboriginal spokesperson told a newspaper that in the past Aborigines "had been endlessly falsely interpreted," and the Internet now allowed them "to cut out the middle people and...to speak directly to their audiences" (n.p.). Yet the same leader complained that 85% of the information on the Internet described as Aboriginal had no input from the indigenous community and "should be pulled down" (n.p.). The potential of the Internet for supporting cultural pluralism is thus dependent on marginalized groups achieving equal access to themselves shape the content of the net.
Interacting or Interacted?
Currently, with Internet use concentrated disproportionately among educated, affluent people, most users of the Net have opportunities for a high degree of interaction. But as the Internet becomes more widespread it is also expected to become more commercialized, with a higher amount of pre-packaged content supplementing (or replacing) user-defined content, and with easy-to-use (but less interactive) machines such as Web-TV finding their place along with personal computers. We can thus expect increasing social stratification among online users, as explained by Castells (1996):
Not only will choice of multimedia be restrained to those with time and money to access, and to countries and regions with enough market potential, but cultural educational differences will be decisive in using interaction to the advantage of each other. The information about what to look for and the knowledge about how to use the message will be essential to truly experience a system different from customized mass media. Thus, the multimedia world will be populated by two essentially distinct populations: the interacting and the interacted, meaning those who are able to select their multidirectional circuits of communication, and those who are provided with a restricted number of prepackaged choices. And who is what will be largely determined by class, race, gender, and country. The unifying cultural power of mass television (from which only a tiny cultural elite had escaped in the past) is now replaced by a socially stratified differentiation, leading to the coexistence of a customized mass media culture and an interactive electronic communication network of self-selected communities (p. 371, emphases in original).
Seen in this light, the three issues described above?the nature of electronic literacies, school reform, and information inequality?are closely related. Electronic literacies can be either empowering or stultifying; people will use the Internet for everything from creative construction of knowledge to passive reception of multimedia glitz. And whether users fall on one end of this continuum or the other is likely to be highly influenced by class, race, gender and country. But highly influenced does not mean completely determined. Literacy practices are influenced by day-to-day struggles of power (Street, 1993), as are uses of new technologies (Feenberg, 1991). And among the main sites of these struggles are schools (Giroux, 1983; 1988). To a large measure, it is in schools and colleges where people will become more or less knowledgeable users of electronic media, critical or less critical readers and writers in an electronic era. Thus the nature of pedagogical practices and school reform will contribute to who becomes the interacting and who becomes the interacted in the network society.
The rest of this book will be dedicated to examining in more detail this question?the relationship between new literacies, pedagogical practices, and struggles for equality and power?by looking in depth at four classrooms of culturally and linguistically diverse students in the state of Hawai'i. Through this process, I hope to contribute to a better understanding of how the teaching and learning of electronic literacies in the schools helps or hinders diverse learners from becoming interacting members of the network society.
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Electronic Literacies and School Reform
Controversies over electronic literacies is taking place in the midst of broader societal struggles over the nature of literacy and schooling.
In many U.S. shools, the technocratic paradigm of literacy that emerged after World War II continues to dominate today. Literacy is viewed as a series of discrete functional skills which can be taught through isolated technocratic methods. Yet this skill-based approach has come under attack.
In a widely-publicized critique of functional literacy, E. D. Hirsch (1987) noted that many students today neither read with much understanding nor have much general knowledge about important historical or current events. Hirsch issued a call for cultural literacy as a proposed alternative to functional literacy. And over the years he has published a series of books detailing exactly what elements of cultural knowledge students of particular grades should know, including names of particular historical figures and dates of historical events.
Though championed by conservative politicians such as William Bennet (Secretary of Education in the second Reagan administration), Hirsch's views have earned broad criticism from educators who see his perspective as out of date with the realities of the 20th century, let alone the 21st. As Tuman (1992) explains,
The essential historical shift behind Hirsch's analysis was from a mercantile, pre-industrial world where wealth (and, by extension, culture) resulted from the accumulation of land and surplus goods (the economic equivalents of Hirsch's lists of cultural information) to a capitalist, industrial world where wealth (and culture) resulted from the systematic application of technological innovation. At the center of modern educational reform that Hirsch so opposes is the realization that, as industrial production replaced domestic economy in the nineteenth century, it was no longer enough to know what one's parents or one's fellow citizens knew (p. 30).
The problems of both the functional literacy and cultural literacy approaches are illuminated by Robert Reich's (1991) in-depth analysis of society and education in the informational era . Reich 's research shows that the vast majority of jobs in developed countries in the current era fall into three categories: routine-production services (e.g., data processors, payroll clerks, factory workers), in-person services (e.g., janitors, hospital attendants, taxi drivers), and symbolic analyst services (e.g., software engineers, management consultants, strategic planners). The income, status, and opportunities for workers in the first two categories are continually diminishing, whereas symbolic analysts command a disproportionate and rising share of the wealth in the U.S. and other countries. What's more, symbolic analysts do work which is enjoyable and personally rewarding, whereas those in routine-production and in-person services do work which (post-Fordist management techniques notwithstanding) is too often dreary and dull.
Reich analyzes the educational experiences of symbolic analysts, which usually take place in either elite private schools or high-quality suburban schools followed by good four-year colleges. Such education focuses on neither the development of basic functional skills nor the accumulation of facts:
Budding symbolic analysts learn to read, write, and do calculations, of course, but such basic skills are developed and focused in particular ways. They often accumulate a large number of facts along the way, yet these facts are not central to their education; they will live their adult lives in a world where most facts learned years before (even including some historical ones) will have changed or have been reinterpreted. In any event, whatever data they need will be available to them at the touch of a computer key (p. 229).
Reich goes on to explain that in America's best schools and colleges, the curriculum is "fluid and interactive" (p. 230). Instead of emphasizing the transmission of information, the focus is on judgment and interpretation. Students are taught to get behind the data, to examine reality from many angles, and to visualize new possibilities and choices. The symbolic-analytic mind "is trained to be skeptical, curious, and creative" (p. 230). This involves an education which is based on abstraction, system thinking, experimentation, and collaboration. Students learn to "articulate, clarify, and then restate for one another how they identify and find answers" (p. 233). They learn how to "seek and accept criticism from peers, solicit help, and give credit to others" (p. 233). They also learn to "negotiate--to explain their own needs, to discern what others need and view things from others' perspectives, and to discover mutually beneficial resolutions" (p. 233). All of this prepares them for their future careers, in which they will "spend much of their time communicating concepts--through oral presentations, reports, designs, memoranda, layouts, scripts, and projections--and then seeking a consensus to go forward with the plan" (p. 233).
Reich's analysis lays bare the weaknesses of both the functional literacy and cultural literacy perspectives and indicates the types of literacy practices which are necessary to prepare students for full participation in society.
These three educational models naturally have different visions of the role of technology in the schools. In the functional literacy paradigm, the computer is a device for delivering instructional drills. The computer supplements the teacher and workbook by offering individualized lessons to assist students develop basic competencies in areas such as grammar, spelling, and reading comprehension. These lessons are referred to as either "drill-and-practice" or, more pejoratively, as "drill-and-kill." Thus the computer becomes a vehicle for literacy (albeit of a limited scope), but does not itself become a medium of literacy practices. Or, in some cases computing itself becomes one of the skills to be taught. In this case, students might be brought to the computer lab once a week and taught various "computer skills," such as the operation of basic programs. But without reference to any other meaningful content, goals, purposes, or tasks, such "computer literacy" does little to enhance broader literacy skills. As Neil Postman (1993) put it, there are "no 'great computerers,' as there are great writers, painters, or musicians." Or, as Michael Bellino, another critic of school computing, stated, "Tools come and tools go....The purpose of schools is to teach carpentry, not hammer" (Oppenheimer, 1997, p. 62).
Hirsch's vision of cultural literacy dismisses the role of the computer in education entirely. The only direct reference to computers in Hirsch's (1987) book suggests that literacy and technological change are opposing cultural forces: "The more computers we have, the more we need shared fairy tales, Greek myths, historical images, and so on" (p. 31). Thus, as Tuman (1992) has noted, Hirsch sees computers as part of a more general movement in culture to increased specialization, and therefore are part of the disease for which broad cultural literacy training is the antidote. Hirsch ignores the role that computerized databases could play (and are playing) in providing the kinds of facts, figures, and linked background information that he feels is so important, and he of course doesn't ponder the effects on cultural literacy of being bound in a print-based world when the rest of the culture is increasingly communicating in an electronic medium (see discussion in Bolter, 1991).
Finally, any educational program which sought to implement Reich's educational goals of abstraction, system thinking, experimentation, and collaboration would clearly have modern technology integrated in as a central component. But, unlike in the functional literacy approach, the computer would not be relegated to imparting basic skills, nor would it be seen as a skill in itself. Rather it would be one of a number of tools that students would learn to use as they engage in authentic and collaborative experiments, projects, and analyses.
Though Reich has not put forward a detailed educational model, the kind of project-based interactive education that he proposes has been elaborated by other educators (e.g., Bayer, 1990; Tharp & Gallimore, 1988; Wells & Chang-Wells, 1992). In fact, such a model of collaborative learning is broadly promoted in U.S. colleges of education, though to the extent that it is actually practiced in schools, especially outside of wealthy and upper-middle class neighborhoods, is open to question (see discussion in Cummins & Sayers, 1995).
Electronic Literacies and (In)Equality
The last issue I would like to look at, and one which will be particularly important for this book, is the complex relationship of electronic literacies to (in)equality in society and in education. This relationship encompasses two contradictory factors: on the one hand, the Internet represents the most diversified mass medium the world has ever known, potentially allowing greater numbers of people than ever before to put forth their views and publish their message. On the other hand, the cost of using personal computers, the language used on the Internet, and other exclusive factors mean that the medium is thus far dominated by a relatively wealthy elite, with most of the world's people shut out from using it at all.
Manuel Castells (1996) analyzes both sides of this contradiction, placing the development of the Internet within the more general trend of control and diversification of mass media. Thus while television, radio, and newspapers are coming under the control of smaller numbers of corporations and governments, they are also diversifying their programming over a plethora of channels, networks, and stations. There is thus an evolution from a mass society to a segmented society, with the audience increasingly fragmented by ideologies, values, tastes, and lifestyles. As Castells points out, "while the media have indeed globally intraconnected, and programs and messages circulate in the global network, we are not living in a global village, but in customized cottages globally produced and locally distributed" (p. 341).
However, this diversification of the media remained unidirectional?with individuals receiving more and more diverse raw material, but not producing it?until the development of the Internet. The Internet is more exclusive than other media (such as television, radio, or newspapers) due to the cost, education, and language requirements necessary to access it. But it is even more diversified than other media in that it allows for not dozens of communication channels, but millions, as each individual user potentially becomes an author and producer.
The Internet had its initial roots among a small number of well-educated, relatively affluent, and mostly male computer users in the United States. It has branched out rapidly to larger numbers of users, but its usage still remains skewed by gender, wealth, and nationality. Within the United States, two 1995 surveys of Internet users found that 67% were male and that 65% were affluent, with the median household income of all users at $62,000 (Castells, 1996). Internationally, the Internet remains dominated by users in the United States and, secondarily, other industrialized countries (see table 1).
Table 1
Geographic Distribution of Internet Host Computers
________________________________________________________________________
Country or Region Percent of World's Internet Host Computers
________________________________________________________________________
United States 60.5%
Western Europe 20.7%
Japan 4.9%
Australia and New Zealand 4.4%
Canada 3.5%
Eastern Europe and former Soviet Union 2.1%
Asia and Pacific (excluding Japan, Australia, and New Zealand) 1.9%
Latin America 0.9%
Africa 0.6%
Middle East (excluding North Africa) 0.4%
________________________________________________________________________
Note. Based on Network Wizard's Internet host domain information for July 1997 (http://www.nw.com/)
Access in developing countries remains rare. For example, Latin America and Africa each have less than 1% of all the world's Internet sites (see table 1). Yet even these figures don't reveal the full inequality. For example, fully 98% of Africa's sites are located in a single country (South Africa), leaving the entire rest of the continent with fewer connections to the Internet than a single good-sized university in the United States. Similarly, 88% of the Internet sites in the Middle East are located in Israel.
The poor in developing countries are not likely to get online soon, as some 80% of the world's population lacks the basic telecommunications facilities (let along computers) necessary for Internet access (Panos Institute, 1995). The elite in developing countries will of course have better access, but they will still be confronted by a situation in which the overall content and direction of the Internet is largely shaped in California and New York rather than in their own country (Schiller, 1996; Wresch, 1996).
At the same time, the many millions who do get online experience a medium dramatically more democratic in many ways than other media or communication channels. First, the Internet allows instantaneous access to vast amounts of information. This is particularly important in developing countries, where resources are scant for international journal subscriptions, newly-published books, and other print resources. Scholars, students, and entrepeneurs in these countries can often get access to types of information online that would have been beyond their reach otherwise (see for example Rich & De Los Reyes, 1995). Second, and equally importantly, the Internet allows these millions of users to initiate communication and provide content, rather than just receive it, whether by sending a simple e-mail message or creating of a web site.
This contradiction?between the Internet as a medium of exclusion or a voice of pluralism?is well illustrated by the use of languages on the Internet. On the one hand, a 1997 study showed that fully 82% of the Web pages in the world were in English (Cyberspeech, 1997). This is partly a result of the Internet's being born in the United States and still dominated by users in that country, and partly a result of the general dominance of English as a language of international communication in academic, business, and entertainment spheres (Kachru & Nelson, 1996; Pennycook, 1995). Indeed, by creating more channels for global communication, and thus a need for a lingua franca, the Internet is likely to strengthen the dominance of English as a global language (The Coming Global Tongue, 1996). At the same time, the "narrowcasting" multi-channel feature of the Internet means that it can allow communication in hundreds or thousands of languages at the same time. This is already evidenced by the amount of discussion on Internet bulletin boards in a great variety of languages (Paolilo, 1997). The result might be that people use English on the Internet for certain instrumental reasons, and other languages or dialects to fulfill other social and cultural needs (Joseph Lo Bianco, personal communication, January 14, 1997). As a result, the main impact of the Internet "is likely to be to protect subsidiary languages," rather than to endanger them (The Coming Global Tongue, 1996, p. 78). Indeed, speakers of several Native American and other endangered indigenous languages have started to make use of the Internet's capacity to connect isolated groups of small numbers of speakers and to allow low-cost archiving and publishing of indigenous language materials as a way to promote language maintenance and revitalization. Of course the potential of the Internet to protect minority languages is no guarantee that this will actually occur, since the fulfillment of that potential depends on access to technological resources which may or may not be available, as well as the commitment of a community to continue valuing its own language when more and more of the world's informational resources are being made available in English.
A recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald (Jopson, 1997) provided a concrete example of the contradictory nature of the Internet for economically and politically marginalized groups The article discusses ways that Aboriginal groups in Australia are using the Internet to promote their culture and express themselves politically. One aboriginal spokesperson told a newspaper that in the past Aborigines "had been endlessly falsely interpreted," and the Internet now allowed them "to cut out the middle people and...to speak directly to their audiences" (n.p.). Yet the same leader complained that 85% of the information on the Internet described as Aboriginal had no input from the indigenous community and "should be pulled down" (n.p.). The potential of the Internet for supporting cultural pluralism is thus dependent on marginalized groups achieving equal access to themselves shape the content of the net.
Interacting or Interacted?
Currently, with Internet use concentrated disproportionately among educated, affluent people, most users of the Net have opportunities for a high degree of interaction. But as the Internet becomes more widespread it is also expected to become more commercialized, with a higher amount of pre-packaged content supplementing (or replacing) user-defined content, and with easy-to-use (but less interactive) machines such as Web-TV finding their place along with personal computers. We can thus expect increasing social stratification among online users, as explained by Castells (1996):
Not only will choice of multimedia be restrained to those with time and money to access, and to countries and regions with enough market potential, but cultural educational differences will be decisive in using interaction to the advantage of each other. The information about what to look for and the knowledge about how to use the message will be essential to truly experience a system different from customized mass media. Thus, the multimedia world will be populated by two essentially distinct populations: the interacting and the interacted, meaning those who are able to select their multidirectional circuits of communication, and those who are provided with a restricted number of prepackaged choices. And who is what will be largely determined by class, race, gender, and country. The unifying cultural power of mass television (from which only a tiny cultural elite had escaped in the past) is now replaced by a socially stratified differentiation, leading to the coexistence of a customized mass media culture and an interactive electronic communication network of self-selected communities (p. 371, emphases in original).
Seen in this light, the three issues described above?the nature of electronic literacies, school reform, and information inequality?are closely related. Electronic literacies can be either empowering or stultifying; people will use the Internet for everything from creative construction of knowledge to passive reception of multimedia glitz. And whether users fall on one end of this continuum or the other is likely to be highly influenced by class, race, gender and country. But highly influenced does not mean completely determined. Literacy practices are influenced by day-to-day struggles of power (Street, 1993), as are uses of new technologies (Feenberg, 1991). And among the main sites of these struggles are schools (Giroux, 1983; 1988). To a large measure, it is in schools and colleges where people will become more or less knowledgeable users of electronic media, critical or less critical readers and writers in an electronic era. Thus the nature of pedagogical practices and school reform will contribute to who becomes the interacting and who becomes the interacted in the network society.
The rest of this book will be dedicated to examining in more detail this question?the relationship between new literacies, pedagogical practices, and struggles for equality and power?by looking in depth at four classrooms of culturally and linguistically diverse students in the state of Hawai'i. Through this process, I hope to contribute to a better understanding of how the teaching and learning of electronic literacies in the schools helps or hinders diverse learners from becoming interacting members of the network society.
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