Last weekend as we all went back into our corners for Reading Week, such as it was, a curious thing happened. Our network as a MACT cohort underwent exponent amplification as we shared poster concepts, crowdsourced contacts and worked together at a scale that I hadn’t seen before. Flash back to a year ago when we first came together. Yes, we connected and we definitely worked together, but over the year, our network has strengthened through our working together on the core courses and learning more about each other. It has also been strengthened by our growing digital literacy and familiarity with Twitter as a social media platform, but also blogging and the course wiki.

Digital literacies are new media literacies as well. Lane Wilkinson is a prolific blogger and librarian who has prepared this chart which outlines what he describes as communicative and evaluative literacies. The left hand side – the communicative literacies – include the skills that will enable us to communicate. It used to be if you could read and write, you were considered literate. In our new digital world, we also need to be able to navigate social media platforms and the web. And if we want to be multilingual, as it were, we need to master some rudimentary visual design skills, learn to make a sound recording which can be uploaded, embed a music file or video, and even create a video. Those are skills that will give us the ‘languages’ we need to express ourselves.

I was stretched this weekend doing my poster, but there were some power people in this regard within our cohort who were very generous. Thank you to you all, and for me, thank you especially for Sylvia, who pulled me out the dragon pit yesterday. I am more design ‘literate’ as result of this weekend boot camp and that’s all to the good.

The world is going to continue to change. Take a look at this Ted Talk by Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world. She’s awesomely inspiring and watching this makes me feel much better about the hours my son spends gaming. We are using our newfound digital abundance wisely and frivolously, but it doesn’t matter much: It’s all creating a richness of interaction that benefits us all.

http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html