Print is BLANK

As part of having my grad students introduce themselves at the start of the class, I asked them to fill in the blank in the following statement: Print is ______.

The classes are a mix of returning and new grad students, so I was interested in seeing if there were going to be a range of answers. What the students answered were surprising.  Most of them still believe in the primacy of print. It can be "evolving" or "changing" but they don't see it going away. There were a few other students who viewed it as an essential format, but a format nonetheless.

I think my favorite response was that Print is something older people worry about. There's is a lot to unpack in that statement. Why are older people worried about it? Why aren't younger people worried about it?  It doesn't hint at if there should be a worry but identifies a dividing line in different methods of thinking.

Here are the answers from my students:

Print is _______

• Not going away.
• Evolving.
• Changing.
• An art form.
• Another format.
• Beautiful.
• My life.
• Stubborn.
• Something older people worry about.
• Never ever, ever, ever going to die.
• Everlasting.
• Form, not function.
• Preferred.
• In flux.
• Alive and well.
• An amazing medium.
• Addictive.
• Useful.
• Relevant.

Digital literacy and perception

I'm reading Shimmering Literacies: Popular Culture and Reading and Writing Online (New Literacies and Digital Epistemologies) by Bronwyn T. Williams and I came across this passage at the beginning of chapter 4:

"They (students) use popular culture icons, catchphrases, music, text, and film clips in postmodern, fragmented collages that present selves that seem simultaneously sentimental and ironic. The construction of these pages illustrates how popular culture practices that predate online technologies have been adopted and flourished with new technologies that allow content to flow across media as well as increase the ease of audience participation. The intertextual nature of popular culture texts creates opportunities for multiple readings of social networking webpages in ways that destabilize the identity students believe they have created. These multiple readings create ambivalence for students who realize that their practices in composing pages online may be in conflict with how they read other pages, and how their own pages are read."

As someone who teaches students who are more immersed in cultural creation than at other colleges and universities, I find this an advanced position for my students to find themselves in- to be creating material with knowledge of audience but with an understanding of how perception on different level changes. Wasn't this one of the goals of higher education? And now our students are learning this starting in high school through social networks? This is more than rethinking copyright and terms of identity in higher education. I need to up my game and not worry about teaching students how to think about perception of content, but focus on more advanced ideas of context. So I guess this goes beyond, "What this book means" and more to "What it means when I say this is what I thought the book meant."