Chris Lott

In late October I had the privilege of presenting at WCET on the topic of digital literacy, new media fluency, and secondary orality ala Walter Ong. Thanks to the able help of Jared Stein (who had his own very well-received presentation) I was able to stream the session live in a format that made a bit more sense to me than the mere talking head and allowed more than 30 people outside the room to participate.

It’s immaterial whether Ong is “right” or “wrong” because his theory is important as a lens. If it reveal something useful, then the specific composition of the lens is, pragmatically, irrelevant. And the theory of a secondary orality is, as I tried to bring out in my presentation, both fantastically relevant to many different areas of the current information ecology/arena (not least in that it might present an opportunity to cut the Gordian knot of digital/media literacy/fluency confusion/conflation – how’s that for slashing a sentence?) and distinctly under-studied.

So, here’s the video (the setup Jared Stein came up with worked well… the only change I would make would be to use a detached cam instead of the built-in web cam… and figure out a way to mic the audience for questions):

And because some of the slides are hard to read on the web-video, the slides:

[photo of Gutenberg statue by Robert Scarth] 

This Thursday, October 22 at 3:15p (Denver (MDT) time, check for your time zone) I and my compadre Jared Stein will be in Denver at WCET presenting on the Gutenberg Parenthesis, secondary orality, and information literacy & fluency. If you are attending WCET, you can just show up at the room: Colorado GH.

If you’d like to participate remotely, we will be broadcasting the session via U-Stream (http://www.ustream.tv/channel/ruminate) and monitoring the live U-Stream chat as well as the Twitter hashtag: #ruminate

I’d love to make this session as interactive as possible because it really is about high-level rumination on something that represents emergent thinking (for me, at least)… so the more I can hear from you the better.

The basic idea behind the session is to explore the potential for the thinking of Walter Ong on secondary orality (the Gutenberg Parenthesis) as a lens for conceptualizing and teaching new media literacy and information fluency. Along the way I’ll dip into a couple of sidestreams, such the “problem” of so many different ideas of digital literacy and the changing role(s) of memory in the context of new media.