While I was reviewing the interviews online, this gentleman totally threw me for a loop when he, essentially, said that the written word was all but dead. “You don’t have to read them to take in what’s in a book…The stuff that’s worth reading, that really matters, is very small…There are very few books that you have to have read…Video is the new text.” Initially, I had an emotional response of, “What the heck?!” This is why I’m going to write based around him. I feel compelled to. “Books are not as good as the internet for contemporary learning.” Whoa! “We accelerate; we do that shorter and more intensely…”
Okay, so he’s ALL about intense experience in short spans. “Almost every book I read I wish were shorter…There’s so much that you don’t want in the stuff you read…” He’s okay, however, if you WANT to learn in a larger format, but “you have to discover that for yourself.” He doesn’t believe that we should be forced to learn any more than we need to learn from any book. If we want more, we can get more, otherwise why? Also, there is the idea that guided learning is the first thing, desire is the second. We have things that teachers need us/want us to learn – that can be pinpointed – (not unlike Darl leading us through “Birth of a Nation”) and if we want to visit the full text, we can. Is this necessarily intelligent thinking? I know that Mark Bauerlein doesn’t necessarily believe so, but then, he’s not necessarily part of the pro-digital media realm either. The two camps are very interesting. For the most part, watching these leading experts in the digital media, media literacy fields almost seems to dictate the need to be in one of the two factions: enthusiast or cynic. Henry Jenkins is fascinating because, if you go to his site, he seeks to be hip: “The first thing you are going to discover about me, oh reader of this blog, is that I am prolific as hell. The second is that I am also long-winded as all get out. As someone famous once said, ‘I would have written it shorter, but I didn't have enough time’” (http://henryjenkins.org/aboutme.html). This is his attempt to be part of the crowd that he is advocating by speaking a similar language. James Paul Gee doesn’t put up this kind of pretense, but is nonetheless not unlike Jenkins.
After Mr. Prensky caught my attention, I had to go and look him up online.
http://www.marcprensky.com/experience/default.asp
Okay, Mr. Prensky is a triple Master’s degree: MA in Theatre, MAT in Teaching (from Yale) and a MBA from Harvard. This is not a man who is necessarily illiterate or unintelligent. He also has taught in public education, performed in music and theatre, helped plan television programming and consulted in film investments, been involved in technology research, e-learning programs, and most recently is developing training games for corporations. He has a wide breadth of experience, knowledge, and interests – which would make him necessarily multimodal because of his multiple disciplines – so why would he be advocating that we read less, and engage with smaller bits that are “more important”? Granted, my upbringing is in reading books and I believe in reading thoroughly – cover-to-cover. For some of what he says, this makes sense, but what is Mr. Prensky leaving behind? What is happening if we are being possibly overabundant advocates of the new media that we neglect some of our past heritage of learning? He feels that getting a book is getting information that is 3 years old when we can have an author’s thoughts from 3 days ago quicker through the internet – is that necessarily better?
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