At the end of last year, my library school classmate Lane Wilkinson and I had this great email conversation. I had just posted Redefining Transliteracy, and he and I discussed the various implications of it. What I found most awesome were Lane's questions regarding definitions of words used in the language-based transliteracy definition: "What do you mean by language?", "What does encoding and decoding mean in this context?", etc.
Given that turnabout is fair play, and that Lane specifically requested feedback, I have a definition-based question regarding his recent post:
What definition of medium is used in this context?
Mean Medium? Mode?
To me, a medium is a go-between over time and space used to convey information:
An artist's medium might be oil on canvas
A telegraph's medium is electricity over wire
At the endpoint of a telegraph (or phone, or radio) is another medium — waves of sound over air
Medium can inform us about a lot of things. It can also confuse the issue. The reason I've pushed so hard for literacies to be defined as language skills is that many languages are relatively medium-agnostic. A letter written in ink on paper and one written in marker on posterboard are different in many ways, including both medium and aspects of visual language; but if the textual content of both is the same, the written language of both is equivalent. If that same text is on a computer screen or a television or a tattoo, the written language portion remains congruent.
In usage, people also tend to conflate medium with mode (semiotic modality). Modality is nearly a sensory means of categorization. Except it's not.
Whether medium or modality, questions arise:
Is there any difference between watching a video on television or on YouTube? Is it the video that's different? The screen? Or is it the non-video stuff that surrounds a YouTube video?
What about a watching a film on an old CRT and a new HD LCD? Different literacies?
Isn't print literacy a visual literacy? If medium or mode is important, what is the necessity of the distinction?
If someone reads text on a computer, is it print literacy or computer literacy or both? Why?
If both the medium and the mode of spoken word and of music is the same, in a medium-or-mode-literacy world can they be considered the same literacy?
Languages
Language requires a medium. Communicating (over time and space) constitutes information being encoded into signs and symbols and sent over a channel, then decoded by the receiver(s) to be interpreted. Often, though, changing the channel has little effect on the integrity of the semiotics. McLuhan's stickiest mind-virus, "the medium is the message," is widely misunderstood, and is dead wrong much more often than it is right.
Since literacies are abilities for a sender to write and a receiver to read a message, rather than abilities of either party to grok a medium, it makes more sense from a literacy taxonomy standpoint to define and categorize literacies by linguistic properties rather than media.
Also, I think the literacy ecosystem would be a lot cleaner if we could agree that, whether "information literacy" is actually a literacy or literacies or not, its name is a really crappy mistake.
Otherwise, the diagram is fantastic. It's especially astute because it shows how literacies named and in common use can be grouped, even if those named literacies are themselves problematic. Literacy sucks indeed.
I'd like to touch briefly on a widely-circulated LJ post by Aaron Schmidt entitled Resist That Redesign. It is generally good advice – using iterative website design rather than relying on complete redesigns. However, I think the advice needs better context.
For one thing, most library websites are really outdated and bad. Comparing the design/development workflows of Apple and Google (nice!) or Amazon and Netflix (not exactly gems of design) to how libraries maintain their sites is apples-to-oranges. If a library has a flat-file website (Not a straw man: this is common in libraries!), performing a complete redesign/redevelopment is probably advisable. A "slowly evolved" CMS developed in-house at a library is likely to be slapdash, and there are tons of available CMSes that are well-designed, secure, free, and supported.
What's not mentioned in the original post is that redesigns don't have to be long, painstaking processes. Bad redesign processes are that way, but a sufficiently-experienced and talented designer can ease those woes. The solution for doing a good redesign is to have a good designer.
Likewise, iterative design isn't always a breezy process, and it often isn't design. Design needs control; website creative control is often lacking in library environments. What often ends up happening under the guise of "iterative design" is actually a patchwork; sometimes from having too many cooks in the kitchen, sometimes from having one crummy cook. We've all seen these websites; they start out clean and freshly-designed. Then someone pastes in a widget and it clashes with the design. Then comes more widgets ad nauseum until the site looks and works awful. As such, the solution for doing good iterative design is to have a good designer.
Library folks: don't resist redesigns. If a well-designed website is important to you, hire a good web designer. Trust their judgment to decide whether the best course of action is to iteratively improve your site or to do a full redesign.
Last week, David Rothman posted Commensurable Nonsense (Transliteracy), a post critical of transliteracy from an Information Literacy perspective. David’s arguments were plausible-sounding fallacies, leading to some serious confusion.
tl;dr
Information Literacy is a bad name for really good concepts. Let’s change the name (again!) to avoid confusion.
Plausible Fallacies
Rothman’s post starts with the two most common definitions of literacy:
an ability to read and write
knowledge of a specific subject
Nothing wrong there. However, it’s implied that for the purposes of transliteracy the second definition is the important one. I don’t see how one would reach that conclusion, given that the definition of transliteracy quoted later in the post starts “Transliteracy is the ability to read, write and interact...,” pointing to the first definition rather than the second. Transliteracy is about reading and writing (or their equivalents in other senses/contexts); working from some different assumption is a straw man.
The second problem is that Information Literacy is not a literacy per his own criteria. If a literacy is an ability to read and write or knowledge of a particular subject, where does “Information Literacy is the set of skills needed to find, retrieve, analyze, and use information” fit? The common definitions of IL as critical skills are incompatible with the extended-but-conventional literacies of transliteracy. As such, comparing IL to transliteracy in such a manner has no bearing.
The second problem I mentioned — that Information Literacy isn’t a literacy — underlies the growing misconception. IL requires conventional literacies, but is not encompassing of them by definition. IL advocates apparently consider IL to be all-encompassing, but that’s a difficult-to-defend position. As such, the topics important to transliteracy, at least before last week, are distinct from IL.
The ensuing discussion has led to confusion over the practical boundaries of these terms. For instance, it isn’t clear how big transliteracy’s domain is per this newly-thin-air-pulled definition. In Why Transliteracy?, Lane insinuates transliteracy encompasses the Venn diagram of IL:
For me, transliteracy is the bridge between isolated spheres of information literacy,...
I'm only using transliteracy as a catch-all for one particular slice of information literacy that I haven't seen before.
This leads me to wonder: is transliteracy an umbrella over Information Literacy and other literacies as most everyone seemed to agree prior to last week, or just some small sliver of IL?
Call to Deprecate
It’s neither, of course! Information Literacy is the notable exception to the transliteracy umbrella. I hinted at this in my Redefining Transliteracy post and a smidge on twitter; here are the charges against IL’s compatibility with transliteracy:
Transliteracy is an ability to read and write across things (which I frame as languages, while others prefer platforms, tools, and media for some unknown reason), whereas IL is an ability to find and critique information
From a reading/writing lens, or any lens for that matter, all literacies are information literacies. IL as a term is redundant and overly-broad
However an information literate entity interacts with information, that interaction is indirect, as information does not exist in any raw form. IL as a term is non-specific to the point of triviality
I cite these charges as more than just a reason not to compare Information Literacy and transliteracy directly; I also contend that it’s reason to deprecate Information Literacy and call its skills something else.
We’ve done this before. As a field of study, Library and Information Science effectively deprecated the term “Bibliographic Instruction” in favor of “Information Literacy.” The reasons behind this switch, it appears to me, were fourfold:
Proponents of Bibliographic Instruction became entrenched in out-moded concepts and techniques, and were unwilling to adapt BI to new technologies and methods
The word ‘Bibliographic’ itself implies books. Library-ish instruction is about much more than books
Information Literacy as a term focuses on the skills of the learner, whereas Bibliographic Instruction as a term was about teaching those skills
Here’s what I’m proposing: From some point in the near future on, people talking about the useful, respectable principles currently referred to erroneously as “Information Literacy” should instead use the term [insert term here]. Previous references to Bibliographic Instruction, Information Literacy, and other less-than-ideal terms should be considered [insert term here] by implication.
Conclusion
I think transliteracy and Information Literacy are like peanut butter and jelly. You can have one without the other, but they’re usually better together. If we can remove the myth that IL is a literacy of comparison (through deprecation or social agreement), we can more effectively work to develop a helpful instructional ecosystem for our patrons. We can look at transliteracy for all the different ways people encode and decode information, and Information Literacy for the critical skills associated with that information parsing.
At the end of May I quoted Voltaire in my first transliteracy-related post: "Define your terms, you will permit me again to say, or we shall never understand one another." It's been a long process, but I feel I've defined a language model of transliteracy to a satisfactory extent. So before I demolish IL in the Information Literacy vs. transliteracy debate, I figured it would be fun to offer a practical example of the language model.
One thing came to mind when thinking of examples: Brian Hulsey's Everyday Transliteracy video. It's known as the "blueberry smoothie" video to many; it shows how someone might communicate the same message (a blueberry smoothie recipe) using different websites and other forms of communication, and all in a concise, friendly manner.
Let's look at the examples through a linguistic lens.
Written Language
Most examples involve some form of written language. In many cases, though, communication via a particular website or other form requires subtle changes of dialect or language variant.
Email
In many ways, the language used in email is most like that of a written letter from perhaps a century ago. If a writer wished to ignore clear, concise business style, he or she could write an email of flowery prose or any other style you might otherwise encounter in written language. To me, the written language of an email is something of a baseline for comparison to other language usage.
Twitter
Linguistically, twitter is an interesting variant. Where you might devote a whole paragraph in an email for a stand-alone idea, the standard on twitter is for one tweet (at 140 characters or fewer) to do the same. As such, someone familiar with the letter/email baseline might develop a workflow for converting their verbose ideas to tweet-appropriate length:
Write a sentence or two. See that it's a number of characters over the limit
Shorten any URLs (more on that later) to preserve space
Use common abbreviations
Go over entire text looking for places to re-word, perhaps with chat/SMS lingo
Start removing things like pronouns and the vowels from certain words
Remove punctuation that isn't absolutely necessary
Begin to question whether the idea(s) might require multiple tweets
There's more to it, such as @replies, but the above workflow is the gist. It's interesting, anecdotally at least, that tweets and text messages diverge somewhat in linguistic usage, despite their similarity in imposed length restrictions. Whereas it's common to use instant message-type lingo (lol, brb, stfu, etc.) in an SMS message, it's at least somewhat less common on twitter. It's also more accepted to go over the character limit in text messaging, while quite impractical on twitter.
Facebook
Facebook doesn't formally impose stringent length limits like twitter. A savvy facebook user, however, knows that a long status update will get cut off at a certain length; and the cut off text is only viewable after clicking a "read more" link. This leads to a subtly different usage than twitter. Facebook users are more likely to use full words in full sentences.
The combination of "read more" links and quoting the first three or so words of comments on profile pages means that effective facebook users avoid "burying the lead." Such users communicate in pithy, concise posts, with their thesis statement within the first few words.
Facebook users may sometimes forgo leading personal pronouns since their name is displayed before their status. This is a less-likely occurrence on twitter, where users are represented by short usernames rather than their actual names.
Blog
Blogs are similar to emails from a written language perspective. There are nuances, of course, but it's long-form writing with the optional addition of hypertext elements, just like rich email.
Telephone (or face-to-face)
Talking on the phone obviously isn't written language. However, I think it's a great basic example of transliteracy. Brian, in the video, reads the necessary amount of orange juice aloud off the screen. This is him reading (decoding) written language and speaking (writing, encoding) the same message into oral language. This is a basic transliteracy that many of us possess that we often take for granted.
A Post-It Note
Similar to long-form written language. For a message longer than originally intended, someone writing a post-it message might employ chat lingo and abbreviations, or might start writing smaller near the end of the message.
Other Languages
URLs
URLs are a written language construct all their own. I learned what URLs looked like, how they worked, and the intricacies of their syntax and semantics from using them, rather than by any formal instruction. However, an internet user can gain a lot from being instructed in URLs.
For instance, Brian was 100% correct to shorten the URL for the recipe before posting it to twitter, as that's common practice. On the other hand, he didn't show how he used the full URL for the resource in facebook. It's knowing usage rules like these that make URLs an important language literacy.
Hypertext
Written language is a special subset of visual language. Hypertext is where, on the web, written language and what we usually consider visual language intersect. Hypertext elements have default styles per user agent stylesheets in the browser, making them visual elements. They are also semantically-defined markup elements per their SGML syntax. So bold text or italic text or a link or a heading appear different from text not wrapped with any markup; the elements' semantics precede their appearance.
A web user who doesn't know how to identify the common appearance and function of hypertext elements would be at a great disadvantage. Often the appearance of form elements, for instance, are derived from similar UI elements from the base operating system's toolkit. However, sites will often style or re-implement elements like buttons, so the essence of button-like symbols is a useful and transferable visual language skill.
Note that in the video, Gmail, twitter, facebook, and WordPress all have similar, but at least somewhat-different, representations of buttons, text fields, text areas, rich text boxes, etc. I think it's in the subtleties of hypertext visual language that it's most practical to use the language model instead of the platforms/tools/media model.
Visual Language
Each site uses layout conventions involving columns, proportion, color, contrast, and other precepts of visual language. How they are similar and different is a teachable thing for those we might instruct. Knowing basic visual language of websites is a transferable skill.
Besides site layout, another interesting form of visual language are symbols, often used as icons. The Noun Project is a cool resource for exploring this aspect of visual language.
Conclusion
I've written a lot about a little, and have still managed to leave out a lot! The literacies at play when doing seemingly-simple things are often complex and varied.
What I wanted to demonstrate more than anything else is that the language model allows us to talk about all the same transliteracy things, but in a way that actually gets to the core literacies.
I think these language literacies allow us to work from a common set of terminology. They let us proceed quicker to developing more-universal and more useful curricula for instruction.
A point to ponder: Brian's video, many (myself included) contend, is a wonderful example of transliteracy. It does not, however, focus in any way on the critical abilities normally associated with Information Literacy.
A cool-looking box arrived unannounced at my apartment two days ago. It was Google's Cr-48 notebook for the Chrome OS Pilot Program. It was a pleasant surprise, and I've been happy trying to crash it for the last 48 hours. Here's an analysis of this gift horse's mouth:
Trackpad
A lot has been made of the Cr-48's keyboard's lack of a caps lock. To me, though, the trackpad is the interface device that has caused the most trouble so far.
On my [aluminum] MacBook, I'd configured the trackpad to right-click when the pad is clicked from the right region and left-click for the left region. This helps out in the OS quite a bit, but is most handy in the browser for "Open Link in new tab," I use that context menu item in reddit, Google Reader, facebook, and for 'shopping' in incognito mode; in other words, for the sites I visit most on the web. I could connect a mouse and click the scrollwheel and get back a lot of lost link-opening productivity, but I want to note that it would be a departure from my previous expectation of laptop trackpads. The "two finger click" right-click gesture on the Cr-48 is terribly-inconsistent and annoyingly-different from previous experiences.
I'm also personally used to a three-finger swipe on the trackpad to go back and forward. Having to use function keys, shortcuts, or move the mouse pointer and click are all super slow in comparison. It won't be fun to browse the web without these features.
Keyboard
I like the function keys a lot. They're: back, forward, reload, full screen, toggle windows, brightness down, brightness up, mute, volume down, volume up.
The search key replacing the caps lock is novel. However, when I accidentally hit the caps lock on any other computer, what I type continues to print to screen, albeit in all caps. On Chrome OS, a new tab pops open and what I type shows up in the omnibox. It hasn't happened yet, but I anticipate it'll cause me some annoyance. Since I use ctrl+t constantly and consistently to open a new tab, I don't really get a huge benefit from the replacement key.
The arrow keys are all scrunched. Meh.
What the keyboard needs desperately is a backlight. It's an all-black machine with a lowercase keyboard (a nice UI touch in my book, since the default letters that appear when you press the keys are lowercase), so it's hard to see what key you're pressing. Perhaps this will be less of a concern when I get used to the slightly-different layout. Also, it's testing hardware, so production mileage will vary. One thing that's occurred to me is that a backlit keyboard might make some of the trackpad issues more bearable.
Performance
Startup is snappy. In fact, it was a breezy process to get the notebook on the internet after unboxing it.
I've found that there's a slight delay in establishing connectivity after opening the lid, but it's not bad at all.
The OS would feel snappier and be more usable if the new tab page loaded faster. For me, it's a race between the URL coming up in the omnibox and the app link appearing on the new tab page. Since the tab page looks cool, I like when it wins the race sometimes.
The big performance problem is flash. I'm not sure if it's the hardware or flash itself or the sandboxing model or some combination of all those things, but watching video on this thing is just the worst. Since I'm a hulu junkie, keeping to my promise to use this as my primary machine is going to suck unless flash performance improves significantly. To be honest, I've already sort of gotten used to watching hulu all jumpy-like in just the last two days. Work with what you're given, I guess.
OS
It's Chrome. I like Chrome.
I think there's a legitimacy to the complaints that you can't really produce content effectively without a robust filesystem and using only web apps. However, I see these as solvable problems that will only get better with time. For instance, I'm confident in my present ability to produce documents in Google Docs (as I have for 3 years now), edit photos and make vector graphics in Aviary, and do other limited media production using web apps.
In order to do this more effectively, though, access to files on peripheral devices has to be better-supported. I've found the core file system satisfactory so far, but can envision it would be better if the various prompts were more unified and the keyboard shortcuts more memorable. I think it'd be cool if downloads piggybacked to my Google Docs storage asynchronously. If local files appeared in a Google Docs List-like interface with the ability to quickly search those files, I think it would be a knock out of the park.
Fun Stuff
ctrl+alt+t brings up the Chrome Shell, or crosh for short. It has a very limited list of commands. I was able to use ssh, so that's cool.
If you click "About Chrome OS" in the wrench menu and select "more info," you can switch between the beta and dev channels.
This note isn't just about Chrome OS, but about the web app store in general. Google specs a 128x128 icon for apps and extensions, but asks that they be 96 pixels square, centered, with padding. This makes the icon ecosystem inconsistent, since developers sometimes glaze over the part about the padding. For instance, Aviary's icon is huge compared to the Google icons.
Conclusion
There are some things I don't like that are probably easy fixes; or they won't apply to consumer hardware. Once the OS gets those fixes or I get used to living without them, this will be a great machine for surfing the web and for occasionally producing stuff.
I'm optimistic that the web is moving forward, and that the few remaining things I rely upon desktop apps for will have viable cloud-based equivalents soon. I'm also confident that Chrome OS will have a novel, simple, usable solution for handling peripheral storage devices and for the necessary interaction with some sort of file system.
It's been fun these past two days, and I look forward to testing this machine a lot more.
