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I’m going to be starting my PhD in the fall and I have a chart of all the things I’m interested in for research. One of them is visual literacy. I’d love to get your take on this. I’m trying to see it from an educational perspective (lesson design, interactive white boards, enhanced version of writing, etc…)

First, it must be said, I was never so happy / relieved / exhausted / elated as when I finished my master’s thesis. Despite having the best thesis advisor in the world. Hi Dr. L! So the concept of a dissertation boggles my mind. Seriously. Boggles. Like, presses it down and pops it up and rattles all the little bits around.

But that’s not really the point here, is it? Visual literacy. That’s the point. So. There’s two sides to how I’m thinking about it.

The first is the individual. Am I visually literate? Are you? How does a teacher decide if a schoolkid is? How do you score someone’s visual literacy as a capability of a human?

The other is the technology. Will this gizmo enable visual literacy? Does it make it easier to intake information? How do you score something’s visual literacy as a capability of a technology?

But the thing that’s more difficult than either of these sides of the coin, is the fact that the overall concept is a moving target.

• Visual literacy now can mean learning how to design and interpret infographics, or being a technology that enables their creation. Five years ago, nobody knew what an “infographic” was.

• It can mean editing YouTube videos. Ten years ago, the only people who needed to know how to make a video narrative cohesive were professional film editors.

• From the professional world down to grade school levels, visual literacy now includes a fluency in PowerPoint. It didn’t exist a few decades ago – presenters used index cards and transparencies on an overhead projector.

So my main point, regarding visual literacy, is the difficulty of defining and measuring a moving target. Schoolchildren will need to be literate in an entirely different way in the next generation than they were in the last one, and it will continue to change. How do you track that, and make sure it’s keeping pace with society? I don’t know the answers.

That’s why I’m not doing a dissertation.

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This might be not at all interesting unless you’re named Sarah. Quite probably not. But as I am… here we go.

According to the journal Speech Communication, some Finnish physiologists did a study in 2003 called “Conveyance of emotional connotations by a single word in English”.

The word, as you’re guessing, was “Sarah”.

They had people say it 10 ways, to express “naming”, “sad”, “pleading”, “admiring”, “content”, “commanding”, “astonished”, “scornful”, “angry”, and “frightened”. And they had people guess which ones were which.

They learned:

1. It’s easiest to say my name in anger, fear or astonishment and get your point across. (I know there’s got to be a joke there.)
2. When you’re trying to speak with neutrality, sadness, admiration, command, anger or fear, you need to focus on changing the  tone of your voice, whereas
3. When you’re trying to convey astonishment, plea or scorn, you need to focus on varying the timing of your speech.
4. If you’re trying to express admiration, positive surprise, scorn, plea, command, fear or neutrality, you sound the same in either English or Finnish.

So what I want to know is…

1. Who cares?
2. Why would Finnish physiologists care about English linguistics?
3. And most importantly, why out of all of the words in the world did they pick my name for this test?

Science. It’s mysterious.

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Impersonal, inane, solecistic. Technology enables communication that is all of those and worse. Children who are functionally illiterate. Teachers who haven’t taught sentence diagramming or Latin roots in decades. Media that has to dumb down.

But as Stanford professor Andrea Lunsford’s found in her Study of Writing (yup, another Wired article), it’s not as bad as we assume. She studied almost 15,000 writing samples over five years and found several interesting things.

• 38 percent of the writing that her students did was “life writing” – outside the classroom – way more than in decades past.
• Not one student submitted a paper with txtspeak in it.
• Students have moved closer to the Greek rhetorical ability of kairos – modifying their written communication to fit who they were talking to and what they were trying to do.

And I love this: “The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. [T]hey defined good prose as something that has an effect on the world.”

We’re starting to the power of our words. That’s a pretty encouraging thought.

* * *

Moreover, also encouraging but almost in the opposite way was a talk I just saw by digital anthropologist, scientist and ethnographer Stefana Broadbent. She showed at TED that the communication technologies like texting, instant messaging, Facebooking, Skype that we see as kind of detached, fire-hose ways to talk – they aren’t as far-reaching as we think. We might have hundreds of friends on each technology, but on average we’re having deep conversations with four or five or six people. That’s it.

She explains that need for these technologies come from the Industrial Revolution. Our jobs don’t exist in the physical midst of our personal lives anymore: we normally have to go somewhere to go to work. She calls the use of these technologies the “reappropriation of the personal sphere”.

We’re changing the fundamental assumption of the last 150 years that doing our job means isolating ourselves from the people we care about. I love that, too.

* * *

So yes, as University College London professor John Sutherland said, much of technology-enabled communication is “bleak, bald, sad shorthand”. As someone who did have to take Latin (um, twice), was forced to create outlines, and can still diagram a sentence, that depresses me to no end. But it’s worth remembering that it can also enable communication that is intimate. Thoughtful. Loving. And unstoppably, unendingly creative.

To me, what matters is whether students still learn the rules before they break them. It’s like music. Once you’re classically trained, you can riff on it. If you grow up thinking it doesn’t matter whether you can spell – if you can’t explain the structures of a sonnet or a haiku -  you’re in trouble. But when you’re fluent in each kind of communication, that’s when you can do amazing things.

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