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September, 1998
In a print society, literacy has been the ability to read and write, and through this to be a fully participating member of a democratic society. The need to acquire this literacy led to the development of a compulsory public education system and a network of local municipal public libraries. This society has been synonymous with formal education as a "front-end" investment from the kindergarten to year 12, and then some form of higher education or vocational training.
In the global knowledge society and its technological infrastructure of computers and multimedia society, education is lifelong and literacy is being extended beyond reading print and writing with a pen.
We are all becoming learners as knowledge navigators, learning just-in-time and at the place of our choice, through a technological infrastructure which includes computer, email, Internet and telephone - and soon assisted by our electronic research assistants, the Intelligent Agent. This new paradigm is forcing a redesign of our education and training systems on a global scale. We are also developing a different view of ourselves.
In the knowledge society with its informational mode of production, we all become researchers. However the language of this research is not just print, whether that be paper-based or electronic. It also includes complex visual language by which the media industry interprets our world to us - whether through news, info-entertainment, documentaries, music videos (MTV) or story-telling. As the new generation of children have the neural connectivity of their brains shaped by the intense visual and auditory stimulation of television, music and computer games, our current problem with behaviour and learning in children, particularly at puberty, may be linked to a different pattern of neural connectivity in the brains of the digital generation, as well as wider cultural transformations of identity associated with the changing workplace. Our traditional system of school organisation, designed for the print literacy and linear assumptions of the 19th-20th century, may be a form of mental cruelty.
Information is no longer a scarce resource. We are awash in information and every day its volume grows exponentially. The critical new skill is not just how to get information relevant to a task, but how to do this within time constraints, and how to extract meaning from all the "noise" of competing voices. The knowledge economy creates value by going up the hierarchy of knowledge. This demands a progression from simple cognition to meta-cognition to epistemic cognition, and finally to wisdom cognition.
This paper was given as an invited keynote address at the Third National Information Literacy Conference, Canberra, December 1997, organised by the University of South Australia Library in association with the ALIA Information Literacy Taskforce.
Barbara Lepani
Australian Centre for Innovation and International Competitiveness,
University of Sydney
Lateral Solutions (Aust) Ltd
30 Chellowdene Ave, Stanwell Park NSW 2508
Tel: 0242 941469
Fax: 0242 948460
Email:blepani@zip.com.au
publications: http://www.aciic.org.au
We can look at the emerging future of our society through the lens of three possible scenarios, and each of these suggests rather different requirements for literacy:
The first scenario is that which has guided much of recent public policy, while the second scenario gnaws away in our subconscious as we anxiously notice the threat of a global economic meltdown of the market economy, the dwindling prospects of secure full time employment for our children, the unravelling of public investment in infrastructure and social capital (health and education services), and the growing politics of resentment among those marginalised by global economic forces which has crystallised in support for the One Nation Party since the recent Queensland election. For example, early findings of The Middle Australia project reveal that families are concerned about a breakdown in family values, the effects of consumerism on the family, and the isolation of the nuclear family from community and extended family support, resulting from external forces. Michael Pusey, director of the study, argues that our broad middle class is a post-World War II phenomenon and that it "is probably falling apart at something like the same rate at which it developed" (Australian, 3.12.97).
The third scenario is the stuff of science fiction and the poetic musings of our writers, film makers, cybernaut adventurers, and others. The techno optimists either believe that technology, as an expression of human intelligence, and the power of the human spirit, will ensure that we find a way through the ecological challenges of our fragile biosphere, or that we will find a way for technology to support our self actualisation in evolution - which may indeed be our evolution into smart cyborgs. The architect, William Mitchell, suggests that Fritz Lang (Metropolis) got it wrong, our cyborg future is not as metallic Madonnas, but soft cyborgs slinking silently through the Net.
Imagine your wristwatch communicates continuously with your pocket computer...anticipate the moment at which all your personal electronic devices (headphone audio player, cellular telephone, pager, dictaphone, camcorder, personal digital assistant, electronic stylus, radiomodem, calculator, Loran positioning system, smart spectacles, VCR remote, data glove, electronic jogging shoes, medical monitoring system) can be seamlessly linked in a wireless bodynet that allows them to function as an integrated system connected to the worldwide digital network.
...By this point in the evolution of miniature electronic products, you will have acquired a collection of interchangeable, snap-in-organs connected by exonerves. Where these electronic organs interface to your sensory receptors and your muscles, there will be continuous bit-spits across the carbon/silicon gap....You will have become a modular, reconfigurable, infinitely extensible cyborg.
...For cyborgs, the border between interiority and exteriority is destabilised. Distinctions between self and other are open to reconstruction. Difference become provisional... Metaphysicians will be tempted to reformulate the mind/body problem as the mind/network problem. Some may want to argue that the seat of the cyborg soul - the postmodern pineal gland - is no longer to be sought just on the wet side of the carbon/silicon divide (Mitchell, 1995:28-31).
The Media Lab at MIT have only recently had their first exhibition of wearable information technology devices. The techno pessimists, like William Gibson, paint a 20/80 future of pervasive menace from big business and big government, but where the 80 per cent have developed anarchistic and moral tools of survival in the information matrix of cyberspace and the pharmacological world of mind/mood enhancements.
I regularly roam across all three scenarios. As a baby boomer, I am a child shaped by the first. I watch the future of my children being shaped by the second scenario, sobered by stories of "the global trap" painted by authors such as Martin and Schumann, and of "the end of work" by authors such as Rifkin. Meanwhile I am the self employed knowledge worker, in my own small humble way travelling in cyberspace, emailing, visiting the Net, participating in bulletin boards. I don't yet wear smart extensibles, but all around me are people with contact lenses, hearing aids, transplanted organs and artificial knees, dreaming of drugs which will fix this and that (witness Viagra), including loss of memory or enhancing their brain capacity. As Sherry Turkle comments, in the past decade the changes in the intellectual identity and cultural impact of the computer have taken place in a culture still deeply attached to the quest for a modernist understanding of the mechanisms of life.
Larger scientific and cultural trends, among them advances in psychopharmacology and the development of genetics as a computational biology, reflect the extent to which we assume ourselves to be like machines whose inner workings we can understand...As we contemplate reengineering the genome (Human Genome Project) we are also reengineering our view of ourselves as programmed beings...Biology is appropriating computer technology's older, modernist models of computation while at the same time computer scientists are aspiring to develop a new opaque, emergent biology that is closer to the postmodern culture of simulation (S. Turkle, 1995:25).
Since the 1970s when I married into a Trobriand Island family and went to live in Papua New Guinea, I have been increasingly aware that reality is, indeed, a cognitive construct, a culturally constructed prism that may easily become a perceptual prison.
The pace and scope of change unleashed by our science and technology is challenging our previous "Newtonian" approach to thinking about our world and designing our education system into its "mechanistic" boxes of subjects, and our administrative system into "departments" based on functional separation. Sustainability is demanding the development of a cognitive ability to manage different forms of "capital" - eg. finance, environment, social and spiritual. The core is the knowledge capital, including its embodiment in technology, through which we manage the interdependencies across the other forms of capital. And this knowledge capital forms a hierarchy from simple data and information to comprehension, insight, foresight and wisdom.
Figure 1 Sustainable Development and Knowledge Capital
Information Literacy
In a print society, literacy has been the ability to read and write, and through this to be a fully participating member of a democratic society. The need to acquire this literacy led to the development of a compulsory public education system and a network of local municipal public libraries. This society has been synonymous with formal education as a "front-end" investment from the kindergarten to year 12, and then some form of higher education or vocational training.
In the global knowledge society and its technological infrastructure of computers and multimedia society, education is lifelong and literacy is being extended beyond reading print and writing with a pen.
Many different concepts have influenced the growing appreciation of what constitutes information literacy, as opposed to traditional ideas of print literacy.
Figure 2 Concepts influencing and coesisting with information literacy
Source: C. Bruce, The Seven Faces of Information Literacy, 1997
ere we see a convergence between the skills and perspective of the teacher librarian, the computer specialist, the learning specialist, research skills, and IT (convergence between computing and telephony, and video). We are all becoming learners as knowledge navigiators, learning just-in-time and at the place of our choice, through a technological infrastructure which includes computer, email, Internet and telephone - and soon assisted by our electronic research assistants, the Intelligent Agent. This new paradigm is forcing a redesign of our education and training systems on a global scale. We are also developing a different view of ourselves.
As Turkle notes, people explicitly turn to computers for experiences that they hope will change their ways of thinking or will affect their social and emotional lives.
When people explore simulation games and fantasy worlds or log on to a community where they have virtual friends and lovers, they are not thinking of the computer as what Charles Babbage, the 19th century mathematician who invented the first programmable machine, called an analytical machine. They are seeking out the computer as an intimate machine (S. Turkle, 1995:26) - my emphasis.
Figure 3 Knowledge Navigators
Becoming knowledge navigators will require us to develop the following skills of information literacy:
Literacy is more than the mechanics of comprehension, it is fundamentally about the making and communicating of meaning. In a computer-based education system it may also no longer be a matter of knowing information, but a matter of doing information (Spender, 95).
The Epistemological Challenge
In 1994-5 I participated in a study, funded by NBEET and under the auspices of the Skills Formation Council, to examine the impact of convergent communication and computer technologies on the education sector. We were asked to provide an overview and assessment of the technological infrastructure used in the delivery of education and training, the opportunities for professional development and support of educators and trainers in computing and communications technologies, and report on strategies available to ensure maximum access for students, particularly those belonging to identified groups.
Later I worked on a study for the Open Learning Technology Corporation who, in particular, wanted to explore the pedagogical implications of information technology for the education sector. Predictively, as information technologies have matured and mainstreamed into the education sector, there has been a growing realisation that the critical issues are not the technologies themselves, but the wider issue of pedagogy and organisational transformation facilitated by the application of information technology to learning and educational administration.
My research has revealed that the recent rapid movement towards ubiquitous electronic networking through convergent technologies, which combine text, voice, image and kinaesthetics (simulations and virtual reality) and with interactivity that enables multiple authoring of communications, is challenging our ideas about core competencies which the education system needs to develop in our children.
As noted in the NBEET report, the knowledge economy demands a competency that links information management skills, systems thinking and learning skills, and information technology competency, at various levels of sophistication. We need to merge concepts of computer skills with information research and analysis skills, in the past often associated with library skills.
In the knowledge society with its informational mode of production, we all become researchers. However the language of this research is not just print, whether that be paper-based or electronic. It also includes complex visual language by which the media industry interprets our world to us - whether through news, info-entertainment, documentaries, music videos (MTV) or story-telling.
Information is no longer a scarce resource. We are awash in information and every day its volume grows exponentially. The critical new skill is not just how to get information relevant to a task, but how to do this within time constraints, and how to extract meaning from all the "noise" of competing voices. The knowledge economy creates value by going up the hierarchy of knowledge.
Figure 4 Hierarchy of Knowledge
Insight requires more than comprehension and an ability to regurgitate information as presented. It requires higher order thinking skills which enable information to be subjected to critical analysis across different knowledge domains, in order to create insightful meaning. With modern technology, neither hearing or seeing should be believing, particularly when it pulls at our emotions and prejudices. Our current education system has a pedagogy which stops at insight. Foresight skills such as scenario planning developed by the business sector are now gaining wider currency, but we will probably have to look to the non theistic wisdom training cultures of the East for a pedagogy of wisdom.
We may break this epistemological progression down through looking at four levels of cognitive processing:
Wisdom is more than accumulated knowledge and experience. It is inner awareness at the highest level of human consciousness, the union of the pure intelligence of emotions and cognition. It rests on centredness, clarity, compassion and courage.
Centredness is the inner balance of equanimity and equality, the sense of personal spaciousness and mindfulness that enables us to care deeply while detaching from specific events and our emotional reactions long enough to see the larger patterns.
Clarity is the ability to transcend self interest and cultural bias to achieve a deep understanding of the interdependence of individuals and community; wealth creation and social development; human culture and the biosphere in which we live. This may be realised in the small scale of home and community, or in the large scale of government, science and business.
Compassion is the limitless power of human love to transform suffering and create well being in ourselves and others. Compassion enables us to transcend self protection to embrace our connection to others, to live from the space of respect, equality and a kind heart, to transform fear, frustration and anger.
Courage is wisdom in action, the ability to honour clarity and compassion in our thoughts and actions, to face our fears, to be open to our vulnerabilities but resolute in our commitment, to embrace the joy of the dynamic flow of life.
The mind can be seen as comprising eight levels of consciousness, the six sense consciousnesses, self reflective consciousness (the sense of "I"), and the eighth, wisdom awareness. This approach to the development of wisdom poses a special difficulty for the Western intellectual tradition for we have a great deal invested in the quality of our thinking and emoting mind, at the seventh level of self reflective consciousness, as the very ground of our security and persona. Yet all the Eastern traditions of mind science tell us that this thinking mind must be transcended, to reach the eighth level of consciousness, the wisdom mind. That intellectual or technical expertise does not equate with wisdom is a common sense experience. We have all met such people.
Goleman's work on emotional intelligence (1995) provides a link to the importance of inner awareness which is part of wisdom cognition. It has challenged the dominance of the computer model of the human mind, reminding us of the crucial importance of emotional intelligence, that the brain's wetware is "awash in a messy, pulsating puddle of neurochemicals". He defines emotional intelligence as comprising the following qualities:
He suggests that paralleling the need for metacognition, is the need for self-awareness as a meta skill, as the capacity to maintain self-reflectiveness even amidst turbulent emotions, the means to be aware of both our moods and our thoughts about those moods. The development of this capacity is central, for example, to most spiritual training, particularly of the East (Buddhism, Taoism, Yoga etc.). Wisdom cognition is like systems thinking. It is not a body of knowledge but a way of of thinking and, for wisdom, being.
Marcia Salner reports that from her work in evaluating student learning among undergraduates engaged in mastering systems theory and methodology at the Saybrook Institute (San Franscisco), some students who were otherwise mature, capable and intellectually able, failed to grasp and adequately apply systems concepts, necessary for higher order thinking. She concluded that systems learning requires a certain way of thinking that is independent of the content of systems concepts themselves, and this is concerned with root assumptions in their model of reality.
The evolution of thinking ability to process root assumptions has been outlined by Perry as:
To this we can add direct awareness itself, the quality of mind cognisance which goes beyond the subject-object dualism of ordinary thinking. In the west, this is usually associated with the epiphany of poetic insight, intuition or mystical states. In the east it is associated with specific mind training through the various methods of meditation and yoga.
Daily, as we monitor current events around us, as reported through newspapers and television, we can see at which level of epistemic assumption the debate is being engaged. There is ample evidence of the need for the structural reorganisation of epistemic assumptions in the direction of increasing complexity. It is a capacity to use information to move from simple dualism to contextualised relativism which is our epistemological challenge. Salner suggests that to achieve this, the systems competencies include:
The ability to see parts/wholes in relationship to each other and to work dialectically with the relationship to clarify both similarities and differences - the ability to balance the processes of both analysis and synthesis.
It is interesting to investigate the impact of information technology on these competencies. Jameson suggests that during the industrial era, the machine of moving parts that one could break apart and put together provided a powerful set of objects-to-think-with for imaging the nature of modern society, of mechanical relationships between body and mind, time and space. This contrasts with how people now experience the post modern world of the World Wide Web.
It's like a brain, self-organising, nobody controlling it, just growing up out of the connections that an infant makes, sights to sounds...people to experiences...Sometimes I'll be away from the Web for a week and a bunch of places that I know very well will have "found" each other. This is not an engineering problem. It's a new kind of organism. Or a parallel world. No point to analyse it. No way you could have built it by planning it (quoted in S. Turkle, 1995: 45).
Teaching to foster epistemic development is relatively content-free. It can be done from the perspective of any academic discipline, for we are not concerned with what the student learns, but rather how the learning strategy is structured. These concerns are central to Diana Laurillard's seminal work (1993) on how the use of information technology for designing and delivering learning is making us re-think university teaching. Much knowledge in the professions, per se, now has an increasingly short shelf life as science and technology constantly challenges our earlier assumptions. Once an expert could hope to have a working knowledge on everything published in their area. This is no longer possible. What becomes increasingly important is epistemic cognitive capacity to know what is useful or meaningful, not just in an ever narrower area of technical expertise, but across many different areas of knowledge in order to understand their systemic interdependence.
As training in wisdom cognition also makes clear, it is necessary to move from knowledge about, to experiential inner awareness, and this requires one to go beyond reading about, to existential engagement with.
The Karpin report's analysis (1995) of managerial competency in Australia concluded that a capacity for such epistemic competence was significantly underdeveloped in the managers of Australia's organisations. They suggested that an over-emphasis on narrow analytical skills (such as financial analysis) has precluded the development of integrative "strategic" skills and the soft or people skills necessary to succeed in modern business. Martin and Schumann's analysis of the socio-political impact of economic globalisation and financial deregulation suggests that modern business and national governments are in the grip of a collapse of epistemic capability, although there are signs that that the recent currency collapses in once booming Asian markets are beginning to stimulate some epistemic thinking (Australian "The Buck doesn't stop with Japan", Malcolm Fraser, 3.12.97).
Mature industrial economies of the OECD face increasing levels of unemployment as globalised companies downsize to reduce costs in the face of increasing international competition in all markets. National governments are experiencing a lethal combination of dwindling tax revenue and rising demands for social support resulting from unemployment and the ageing of the population, while once great national companies move their profit declaration to off-shore tax havens. The dynamics of free market capitalism are undermining the foundations of liberal democracy. The interests of global shareholders are outstripping those of workers and local communities. Yet driving this investment behaviour are the large pension and superannuation funds managing the savings of the very same workers who are progressively losing their jobs and communities in order for firms to maximise shareholder returns (Martin and Schumann, 1996).
A similar failure of epistemic capability can be seen in the current national debate about Aboriginal land rights, immigation, cultural identity and employment.
Beyond Linearity
While the theory of relativity introduced us to the idea that time and space are not absolutes, but a continuum, and Quantum Mechanics introduced us to the Uncertainty Principle and the idea of non local causation, the Mathematics of Chaos has revealed to us the non linear world of fractal patterns, strange attractors and fuzzy logic.
The Newtonian view of the world as a machine of moving parts which could be managed by God (or science), and the certainties of modernism and a belief in progress, have been fractured. Yet we begin to see a new pattern in this seeming chaos of post modernism. The fractal patterns of nature exhibit this wonderful pattern of self similarity, of a unity of the micro and the macro that may be as powerful for helping us understand what is going on, as the Newtonian world view has been in detecting linear causality. Evolutionists suggest that, in contrast to the laws of entropy, life's movement through evolution is the process by which matter moves towards higher states of complexity and greater levels of awareness. Prigogene's work suggest that when systems move towards disequilibrium, they either collapse (entropy) or bifurcate to higher orders of complexity (evolution). Rushkoff suggests that this process is being accelerated by technology.
Inventions like the telephone, television, radio, tickertape, photocopier, fax machine, modem, Internet, cable TV, video teleconferencing, computer bulletin board and the World Wide Web all function to increase the number of ideas and number of people with whose thoughts we come in contact. With each successive development in communications technology comes a corresponding leap in the number of ideas with which it requires us to cope. As we incorporate each new invention into our daily life, we must accelerate our ability to process new thoughts and ideas (Rushkoff, 1997:3),
Rushkoff's central thesis is that culture is also subject to the laws of evolution and that through the process of complexification resulting from information intensity and fusion, we are becoming hardwired into a new form of global metabeing - for both good (the online economy and multiculturalism) and the bad (pornography and the politics of violence). He maintains that post modernism embraced by the popular culture of the young through such things as MTV, channel surfing on television, surfing, snowboarding and skateboarding, are all pioneering a new milieu of non linearity, of an acceptance of the very natural, organic and complex property of life called chaos.
The emergence of cyberspace challenges the horizons and habits of print-based culture (Spender, 1995) which, combined with the idea of the "individual" as the most flexible/tradeable legal entity for capitalist economic organisation, has shaped the evolution of western culture with its strong emphasis on both "time" and the "individual" for structuring reality. Spender suggests that just as the watch and the book have influenced who we are and how we explain our world, so now are the new technologies "reprogramming" the human condition, and that this poses a significant challenge for those of us who grew up and became skilled in a print-based community.
Print culture and print literacy demanded a strong commitment to linearity, to the authority of the author and to the linear structure of story of a beginning, middle and end. This not only facilitated our access to more information than that available in oral culture, it dramatically changed the nature of how we perceived reality. One consequence is that there grew an increasing gap between what we knew through direct experience, and what we knew about. The knowledge once encoded in song, dance and myth and accessed through participation as group process became encoded in books and accessed through individual reading. Oral culture still survived, we still talked to one another, but power and authority shifted to command of the written word, rather than the spoken word.
While early television culture retained this linear commitment, the arrival of MTV introduced a new visual language of cognitive dissonance. This visual language was taken up by advertisers, and finally by cult programs such as NYPD Blues. My children and I fought over the remote control. While they wanted to surf the channels and enjoyed the cleverness of advertisements, I used the remote control to mute the advertisements and retain my complete commitment to the story of choice, or better yet to restrict my viewing to the ABC or SBS.
Latest research indicates that it is unlikely that our brain functions like most computers but uses a combination of neural networks and preferences for the way its networks are connected. It starts with some initial preferences and then trials many strategies (neural connections) until a combination is found that gives the desired (culturally emphasised) result. While increasingly stable over time, they are not set in concrete. Rather they are like rivulets in sand - they get deeper and deeper as long as the water continues to flow along them - but water can flow elsewhere in the sand, and old paths can dry up (Colins & Chippendale, 1995). Thus it harder to learn tennis at 40 years of age, than at 10 years of age, but not impossible.
How will this new culture of electronic interactivity and densely visual language make us different? We know that the neural pathways in our brain are laid down over the first years of our life, maturing at puberty. This is why it is more difficult to learn a new language as an adult. Experience with deaf children and with children for whom some extraordinary life experience deprived them of the opportunity to communicate with language at all, reveals that learning grammar, the deep structure of language, becomes extremely difficult after puberty.
While teachers and adults bemoan the loss of attention span in children, their ability to maintain linear commitment, others note a dramatic increase in attention range - an ability to piece together meaning from a discontinuous set of images, to be able to do many things at once - watch three television channels or listen to the radio and study. Rushkoff even suggests that children's short attention span may arise from the fact that they have learnt to process visual information very rapidly because the new language of visual information depends as much on the relationship of different images and images within images as it does on what we generally understand as content. He cites the way the modern stockbroker or financial trader needs to read many screens at once, surfing for information which makes a difference, while talking to a client on line.
Ridpath's thriller, Trading Reality, picks up this theme with "Bondscape" a virtual reality computer system for analysing bond markets by converting rapid price movements to a metaphor of landscapes with clusters of buildings of different sizes and colours and with national flags, representing the world's bond markets. Each building represents a particular bond issue, the height of the building representing the yield. This three dimensional dynamic imaging allows for rapid insight in an environment of high uncertainty and high rates of change.
Rushkoff sees, arising from popular culture and television behaviour, combined with the skills of the video and computer games of the Nintendo generation, the development of the very skills we will require to cope with information overload.
Like a surfer who comes to understand the self-similar quality of beaches, tides, waves and their components, the data surfer comes to recognise the qualities of different sorts of data structures...The ability to recognise the quality of something from its shape and to trust one's impulses based on this recognition may be the key skill in understanding any chaotic landscape... The inability to process and interpret visual media will soon be much more debilitating than many of us care to admit. (Rushkoff, 1997:52-53).
Jaron Larnier considers that virtual reality will challenge our habitual perception of reality as being separate from our cognition of it.
What's interesting about virtual reality is that it forces one to have a different sense of one's place in an environment. For instance, when you watch a movie, the camera is like an ego, in that you're always looking from an imposed perspective. When you're in virtual reality, however, the only thing that identifies you as being in a particular part of the world is that your sensory motor loop is attached to that part of the world. So if the world happens to be set up so that your eyelids control the doors, then the doors feel like part of your body.... Our minds are potentially fully fluid, but we often think of them as not fluid because our bodies are not... The experience of virtual reality forces you to notice your own experience of consciousness (J. Larnier, 1994).
Non linearity has also been extended through hypertext and the World Wide Web. Hypertext links allow stories and ideas to develop along multiple pathways with parallel connections, through the participation of many actors.
Methodist Ladies College, Melbourne, an early innovator in the use of technology in learning through each student having their own laptop computer, has established a Critical Literacy Group to explore its implication for new forms of literacy. They note that multimedia permits an extraordinary flexibility in conveying concepts - through words, pictures and sounds, as something that can be built or played as well as read or watched.
Under the regime of print literacy and linearity, traditional school education has been seen to discriminate against imagistic, holistic learning styles, a capacity, for example, which is important for the foresight skill of scenario planning. The Ned Hermann diagnostic instrument can be used to determine our internal preferencing patterns in how we learn (use our brain), based on the four quadrants of left and right modes of specialisation, discovered through split brain research. An analysis of school curriculum and learning methods reveals a strong preferencing of activities which use the lower left and lower right quadrants, while the more academic learning of university education favour the upper left quadrant. Multimedia and hypertext offer new ways to harness upper right brain learning preferences, thus empowering those learners with a strong natural preference for this mode, a group usually alienated by traditional formal education.
Figure 5 Learning Preference Styles
Recent evidence from James Cook University and the University of Southern Queensland also suggests that Aboriginal learners are significantly empowered through multimedia, as opposed to the linearity of print literacy. This is consistent with recent experience in examining the implications of Howard Gardner's concept of multiple intelligences in the design of learning strategies (S. Veenema and H. Gardner, 1997).
So preoccupied have we been by the conceptual mind and its analytical abilities (left brained functions) that we have failed to develop a model for linking the conceptual level of mind with the mytho-poetic level of mind, yet it is this aspect of mind which is the target of both the entertainment industry and advertising, as well as higher cultural activities such as literature, theatre, music and the visual arts.
As discussed earlier, the wisdom level of mind is largely uncharted in western pedgagogical theory and practice. In Figure 5 it can be diagramatically shown as a domain of consciousness of inner awareness.
Figure 6 Mapping Mind
As the new generation of children have the neural connectivity of their brains shaped by the intense visual and auditory stimulation of television, music and computer games, our current problem with behaviour and learning in children, particularly at puberty, may be linked to a different pattern of neural connectivity in the brains of the digital generation, as well as wider cultural transformations of identity associated with the changing workplace. A recent AC Nielsen survey of 5,700 children in Australia and 11 other countries reveals that while one in three children and teenagers have a personal television set and computer, only one in three read a daily newspaper. Our traditional system of school organisation, designed for the print literacy and linear assumptions of the 19th-20th century, may be a form of mental cruelty.
Mary Mason, a member of the Critical Literacy Group at MLC suggests that this new domain of non linearity is not only breaking down all kinds of boundary spaces of subject disciplines, mediums of representation, time and space, but is also revealing the lesser ability of traditional rational-analytical structures (upper left) to deal with the complex nature of conceptualisation in this boundaryless domain. Instead it requires a much greater fusion between the upper left and upper right learning modes. She notes that this is a medium, particularly using programs like Microworlds or Lego-Logo, which can put together the concrete and the abstract at their most opposite ends, enabling conceptualisation in ways that Piaget could only dream about.
Conclusion
We are also currently witnessing a fundamental re-shaping of the workforce and society. Reich (1994) has suggested that the new division of labour is no longer between skilled and unskilled labour, but between symbolic analysts, in-person service workers and routine production workers. While the latter are the most vulnerable to technological displacement, the in-person service worker is most vulnerable to falling wages due to the difficulty of leveraging productivity through technology. Symbolic analysts are the most likely to benefit from access to rewarding work and high incomes. They work as problem identifiers, problem solvers or strategic brokers, involved in the manipulation of symbols (data, words, oral, audio, visual representations). They develop ideas and translate them into marketable products and services across the globalising value chain of production. They concentrate in areas of high synergy such as Silicon Valley in California or Sydney in Australia. But once established they can operate from anywhere. For example, people like John Naisbitt (Megatrends) runs his global business from a remote village in Colorado, employing just three people.
In New South Wales, while professional jobs have trebled over the past decade, blue collar jobs have remained stagnant, and white collar low skill jobs are vanishing. Since 1986 two million male blue collar jobs and nearly half a million male white collar jobs have been lost. The four major banks alone shed 30,000 jobs since 1991, with a further loss of 60,000 predicted by 2005. These trends are even more marked in South Australia. Most new jobs being created are part time and increasingly these are casualised. In Australia 26 per cent of work is part time, compared to the OECD average of 18 per cent. Temporary professionals in the USA have increased 60 per cent since 1980, twice as fast as the temporary workforce as a whole.
Paralleling these trends has been a significant increase in self employment among knowledge workers, and the rise of modular work (Marcus Lester, 1997). Taking up Charles Handy's idea of the portfolio career (high mobility across employers rather than reliance on a secure career with one employer), Lester seeks to demonstrate how individuals can create "careers" from modules of part-time, contract and casual work - using some as cash cows, and others for meaningful engagement in building knowledge, skill and employability.
Rifkin, on the other hand, suggests that we may be seeing the end of a social order based on full time employment in paid employment.
For the whole of the modern era, people's worth has been measured by the market value of their labour. Now that the commodity value of human labour is becoming increasingly tangential and irrelevant in an ever more automated world, new ways of defining human worth and social relationships will need to be explored (Rifkin, 1995).
We may see a way out of the social nightmare of the 20/80 society of globalised free market capitalism with the development of the lifelong learning community as a re-invention of the welfare state. As schools become wired to their communities, they are also becoming the hub of community-based lifelong learning, evolving into true learning communities. This is happening through programs as diverse as the early childhood intervention programs of the Interagency Schools as Community Centres pilot projects in New South Wales and Enterprise education in schools like Salisbury High School in Adelaide. Salisbury High School is open from 7.30am till 9.30pm, 49 weeks of the year and features 15 partnerships with local industry and a linked youth annexe catering for homeless students and students at risk of leaving school early. Salisbury recognises that young people will need more skills than the traditional 3Rs. They will need to think for themselves and understand technology so that they can access information and make it work for them, and above all they will need to be resilient.
Many of these students, faced with the emerging 20/80 world of the formal workforce and the enforced marginality of long term unemployment may take technology and re-invent the informal economy of direct barter. As Mark Latham, Federal Opposition spokesperson on education has noted, poverty is not just a matter of lack of material wealth. More significantly it is the loss of social capacity through meaningful engagement with society, and this may now be up to three generations in duration in some communities in Australia.
The empowered knowledge navigator of the near future may reject the sort of people's capitalism favoured by the selling off of public infrastructure or the transformation of membership-based insurance funds such as AMP to companies which reward their CEO with a personal individual grant of $10 million worth of shares, compared to members' $5000. The threat of a global economic meltdown gives us an opportunity to re-evaluate the notions of wealth and community. Our students, who will become the leaders of the future, may take up Rifkin's challenge and create a new kind of post modern society that replenishes our diminishing stocks of social and spiritual capital to recover civil society.
Information literacy may therefore serve many ends, from the ambitions of the symbolic analysts of the global knowledge economy to the dreams of the new communitarians of civil society. We will require this literacy, incorporating previous print literacy and oral communication skills, to be effective citizens. Our teachers will require this to be able to develop it in our students, and our librarians will require this to fulfil their historic mission to ensure public access to information, knowledge and culture - whether that be stored in print or electronic form.
References
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