Ilana Snyder’s “Page to Screen”


This selection is the preface to Snyder’s book Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era. This book is a collection of essays from a variety of authors that offer different perspectives on the “newness” of digital literacies. The authors in this book begin to consider that the concept newness is a little misleading because most of these technologies aren’t really new—they’re simply an extension of a prior technology. Snyder compiles a list of questions that act as starting points for the conversations taking place in the book:
How new are computer-mediated literacy practices?
Do they signal the dawn of new literacies of do they only re-incarnate old ones?
What is ‘new’ about them?
How do we asses them?
Does their use enhance literacy practices or diminish them?

She continues, “These questions are raised within the broader context of a culture that valorizes, even fetishes, ‘newness’ at the same time as it extols the traditional and the old” (xxx).

Another key issue that this book addresses has to deal with educators and the “newness” of technology—teachers, unlike their students, tend to not be too interested in new technologies. Snyder describes this as a “widening gulf” (xxii). She concludes, “Just because we have remained largely impervious to technological change does not mean that this is how we should continue to respond. Even more important, if we are to begin to bridge the growing gulf between ourselves and our students, we cannot afford to remain ignorant of the characteristics of these new technologies and their complex cultural influences” (xxiii).

Snyder gives brief summaries of what the book discusses, including particular theories of the other contributors. (I won’t run through all of them—I’ll just mention the few that stand out most to me.) In the section of the book that deals with the “spaces of electronic literacies” Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe talk about the social struggles that come with commercialization of technology, including the idea of intellectual territory.

According to Knobel, Lankshear, Honan and Crawford discuss how new technologies can be used for the benefit of second-language learning (similarly how in other decades had different kinds of audio-visual technologies).

Charles Moran and Gail Hawisher examine the difference between postal mail and the new forms of communication that appeared with the new technologies (particularly email). The language used in email tends to fall somewhere between the language used in speech and that of print. They also talk about the issue of access, stating that the email is part of a “gated community” because only 2% of the world’s population are connected to the internet. (It should be kept in mind that this book was published in 1997.)
Snyder includes Burbules discussion of hypertext and hyperreading (which I think is probably the same information from the article of his that we read last week). In the same conversation about hypertext, Snyder includes Michael Joyce’s distinction between hypertext and multimedia—hypertext perhaps acting as an education tool, while multimedia acts more like television (“the vast wasteland”).

Another theme of this book deals with educators’ lack of acceptance of the new technologies. Smith and Curtain “suggest that teachers will encounter professional dilemmas when dealing with their young students and this new era will generate feelings of intellectual incompetence and powerlessness among educators” (xxxii).

Snyder concludes this preface by talking about whether or not these technologies are truly new. In Burbules discussion of hyperreading he suggests that people are actually just using their reading skills in a new way, making hyperreading an extension of reading rather than a whole new skill. In the same regard, email is really just an addition to letter writing—people are adjusting the skills they already have into digital environments. Snyder concludes by describing an Annie Leibovitz picture of Bill Gates where Gates was standing on a seemingly endless highway surrounded by desert (hinting at the information superhighway). Snyder writes, “It seems to me that our responsibility and challenge as educators and researchers it to explore this terrain, whatever its features, to devise the theoretical and practical understandings that will allow ourselves and our students to reconnoiter it wisely” (xxxiv).

COMMENTS:
It feels a bit odd to look back at work this that was done in 1997 because so much has changed since then when it comes to technology. For example, Snyder writes, “history suggests that we should remain somewhat skeptical about how the wiring of our schools might affect pedagogical practices” (xxii-xxiii). It seems to me that we are coming closer and closer to having most classrooms wired, and I would say that I think technology will (or perhaps already does) affect pedagogy. But Snyder also seems to be implying that educators need to jump on the technological band wagon before they get left further behind. Without reading the rest of the book it is hard to say what exactly Snyder believes by putting out these contradicting ideas.

I found this piece difficult to abstract because it briefly discusses the opinions of so many people. I hope I was able to make some sense of it for you guys!