OMMUNITY Our Children By Jason B. Ohler
content. (figure 2). In
contrast, a new kind
of presentation is in wide use for effective blog or web writing that I call “visually differentiated text” (VDT), a kind of visual rhetoric that employs a number of writing conventions that are used to visually sculpt text. Paying more attention to the visual presentation of text has become important because reading words on screen is more difficult than reading them on paper. In addition, information overwhelment has produced a need for information that is more concise so that it can be scanned and referenced more easily. Typically, sculpting text requires using the 7Bs (breaks, bullets, boldface, boxes, beyond black and white, beginning, and banners). More about the 7 Bs on my Digital Citizenship website (
jasonOhler.com/dc).
The
second reason writing is
so important is
because it still serves as the foundation of much of the new media
that we see on screen. Digital stories, movies, documentaries, and many new media narrative forms are built upon clear, well-researched, creative writing. The old theater saying “If it ain’t on the page then it ain’t on the stage” is particularly true today in a world in which it is easy to create personalized media. I have helped students and teachers create many hundreds of pieces of media over the years and have discovered the following: If there is one element of student media production that separates the good projects from the not so good projects, it is that the former are built on solid written foundations.
What should our school board do? They should honor multiple forms of writing, including essay, report, story, scripts, and VDT. They should expect to find examples of each in student portfolios, and in the web writing that students develop for student projects (p. 206-209).
(figure 2)
Rest assured that essay writing is still important. But, students need to be able to command multiple approaches to writing. While essays, such as the one you are reading right now, focus on detailed argument presentation, VDT is used to present text concisely—a combination of narrative and factoids. Bear in mind that while essays are generally written for an audience of instructors, web material is read by the general public. Thus, the pressure is on for web writers to write clearly and precisely for a wide audience. After all, while our eyes may skip paragraphs, readers tend to focus on bullets surrounded by white space.
When it comes to educating our children, shall we consider them to have two lives or one?
It is up to us.
* Excerpts reprinted with permission from author. Ohler, J. (2010). Digital Community, Digital Citizen. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
Dr. Jason Ohler is a professor emeritus, speaker, writer, teacher, researcher and lifelong digital humanist. Read more at
jasonOhler.com.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36