LIKE 14 - Transliteracy

I went in to the LIKE meeting not knowing much at all about transliteracy but that did not matter as all it needed to be was a prompt for good conversations. And it was.

The formal definition we were given to play with was, "a unifying perspective on what it means to be literate in the 21st Century [including] the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks". This definition comes from Professor Thomas and was given to us by Susie Andretta, our facilitator for the evening.

As usual, the conversations wandered wondrously and unpredictably around the topic with each participant nudging it a direction of interest to them or reacting to something that has been added to the mix.

My notes from the evening, also as usual, are a odd mix of things that struck me as we wandered through the evening. One of the reasons that I write these blogs is to allow me to reassess these notes for my own benefit and to give them some sort of structure. This is some of what I wrote, but not in the order in which I wrote it.

Transliteracy, i.e. being literate across many media, is a recently problem. Not that long ago people got all their information from one newspaper and the BBC.

When new media first arrived it was treated like old media; think about how your local library filed videos and tapes.

The literacy skills in the various media and both different and similar. For example, comprehension differs but authenticity is similar. I would like to see further research in to transliteracy explore these differences and similarities to help us all to understand which skills we can transfer and which new ones we need to learn.

While I understand the term transliteracy I am not sure whether it actually helps to use a new word that only a few academics understand. Perhaps something like multi-media literacy, or even just multiliteracy, would be more accessible.

I was pleasantly surprised to find myself quoted in a paper on transliteracy given at a conference of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA).

With the arrival of the food and more drinks the conversations wandered even further off topic and my remaining notes are on KM chats on Twitter, Dulwich Picture Gallery and EHICs.

This was another very successful evening and I cannot overstress how useful I find LIKE meetings to my continual learning as a consultant, my intellectual stimulation as an, er, intellect, and my social interactions as a human being.