Cut and paste literacy
January 31st, 2006In my last rambling post on thinking about the potential learning that might go on when kids get a hold of HTML in MySpace, I mentioned a possible objection to notions of “learning” when equated with “cutting and pasting.” Namely, what is learned from cutting and pasting? Isn’t it the equivalent of copying another kid’s math homework?
A few days after writing, I was in my first day of class called “Literacies: Old and New” and this idea came up again in a different context. Professor Andrea DiSessa was showing us work done by middle schoolers using his Boxer software (online description not where it used to be… sorry for no link) and mentioned how kids were able to copy and paste Boxer scripts from a shared library of Boxer scripts and that this helped the cutter/paster build more complex projects. He also talked about the satisfaction kids had when walking through their scripts with less experienced kids, which was often followed by enthusiastic idea exchanges. DiSessa posed the question to us: can one claim that this is some new sort of “cut and paste literacy?” And, if so, how might it relate to textual literacy, where quoting is encouraged, but “copying and pasting” is the equivalent of plagiarism? I think that his point went way beyond making sure to attribute source code to original authors.
Two colleagues of mine found this interesting and mentioned having explicitly heard the term “cut and paste literacy” or “copy and paste literacy” or something like that before. I did a quick search and found a few potentially interesting links:
A 21st Century Challenge: Preparing ‘Cut and Paste’ Students to be ‘Information Literate’ Citizens, by Paula Murphy of the Teaching, Learning, and technology Center at UC, published online in 2002.
Educating the Cut-and-Paste Generation.(teaching information literacy) published by HighBeam Research (warning: I have no idea who this group is and didn’t want to pay for the article or deal with the trial version…).
Cut, Paste, Publish: The Production and Consumption of Zines by Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear in 2001.
I have not read these pieces thoroughly (or at all, in the case of the second one). My point here is to just give some evidence that this is not something “new” (as in just thought about for the first time in 2006), and that there is probably a lot more literature out there to go through, in both academic journals, popular press, and other venue.
To end on an ironic note, while cutting and pasting these links and titles, I realized that I may be helping boost their ranking on search engines, even though I haven’t read them. If I hadn’t realized this, would I have been demonstrating an “illiterate” or “non-literate” practice associated with cutting and pasting? And how that I have decided to leave the links in, even though I still haven’t read them, what am I demonstrating?