Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Copyright The College of Education and Human Ecology, The Ohio State University
ISSN: 0040-5841 print/1543-0421 online
DOI: 10.1080/00405840801992330
Kristina Woolsey
Matthew Woolsey
Childs Play
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Childs Play
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When Dewey (1897) considered an unpredictable future, he argued for an ever increasing
premium on higher order skills, on directives
for encouraging creative capabilities, leadership
skills, and learning competencies in our youth.
Hence it is impossible to prepare the child for
any precise set of conditions. To prepare him
for the future life means to give him command
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Childs Play
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Figure 1. The Visual Almanac (1990) provided individuals with collections of images and sounds, a composition
workspace with tools for creating new sequences, and activities that demonstrated just how the images could be
combined.
of craft knowledge and refinement, casual multimedia is defined by a high ratio of content
to technical requirement. The compositions that
users of the Visual Almanac created were easy
to create technically; the focus on these compositions could be their content.
VizAbility: Exercises to Develop
Media Skills
The notion of a fluid, spontaneous, sensoryrich new medium was a very exciting idea in
the 20th century. Professionally produced mediarich interlinked materials were proving to be
valuable to encourage learning. Yet as handheld
technologies and wireless connectivity began to
become realities, one could imagine that visual
and auditory images could become central to
everyday communications. These digital images
would be widely produced and exchanged, as
well as viewed by everyone. However, it became
quite evident very quickly that most people,
including youth, did not have well developed
competences with image-rich materials.
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Childs Play
Figure 2. VizAbility (1995, 2005) provides a set of exercises to enhance ones basic visual literacy, including
sections on the skills of seeing, drawing, diagramming, and imagining, as well as experiences with environments
and a culture that support visual fluency.
Figure 3. This VizAbility exercise is designed to enhance ones fluidity in combining images, sounds, and texts
in a slide show.
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Childs Play
Figure 4. The New Media Thinking Project design prototypes provided youth with templates to organize their
school reports and to expose them to reasonable graphic design. As the students became fluid with these templates,
these design constraints were removed and students designed their own report formats.
Figure 5. General observations of youth suggest that the digital media competencies of youth and adults are
highly complementary, with youth more masterful with technical issues and adults with fundamental principles.
This pattern suggests an excellent opportunity for collaboration.
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Looking Forward
In sum, the technologies for image and sound
manipulation are now extremely congenial to
exploration and play. Socially constructed visual
archives on the webGoogle Image, Flickr,
YouTube, and othersprovide ready access to
available images. Digital still and movie cameras
and microphones are inexpensive, and provide
fluid sources of personal images and sounds. The
tasks are now to create large sets of electronic
activities for youth to play with these possibilities, not for them to learn how to be media
professionals but for them to become effectively
expressive and analytic citizens, and for adults
to provide the big picture for these activities,
e.g., scaffolding youths understanding of design,
intent, judgment, and other guiding principles,
even as they, too, maintain a playful responsive
approach.
It is important to realize in doing this, that
images and sounds will ultimately not simply
provide new ways to do old things. New things
will emerge. Youth will begin to invent new
media forms and adults will see new possibil-
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ities. Ideas that were complex to earlier generations will be simple to new ones. Language
arts will expand to include competencies in
Cyberspaceprogramming and simulation and
global collaborationas well as more readily
understandable ScreenTime media forms, such as
movies and podcasts and blogs and wikis. Youth
may begin to think very differently than adults
as a function of their new media-rich language
community. The changes have just begun, and
the technological changes that have caught everyones attention may soon be dwarfed by cognitive
and cultural shifts.
References
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Childs Play
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