Minitrack Summary: Media Literacy-Reading and Writing Digital Forms

What does it mean to be literate in today’s world? Reading and writing prose used to be enough. But the world is fast going post-textual. Some claim that you can’t be literate in the internetworked world if you can’t deeply read many media genres... and create them as easily as jotting a note. The traditional notions of document as “letter” "office memo" or "textbook chapter" have changed, and are now likely to be email, include pointers to web sites, references to IRC channels, images in the body of the document, interactive content (such as Flash or Java-based media), audio annotations and video. What’s more, these definitions are constantly under flux. Media stability and long-term writing skills in a particular media type and genre are luxuries. We have to reconsider what it means to have "documents" in the workplace as media types multiply and increasingly becoming realtime and connected in nature. Is RSS a documents or a media stream? Is MSNBC a web site or a channel? And as importantly, how is it that we come to create and use such diverse kinds of media? It has become increasingly apparent that corporate and educational content is distributed via focused narrowcasting or via special web documents. Meetings and presentations are being captured on digital video for later reference, with indexing and search tools becoming as common as the jog shuttle, fast forward and rewind. Rather than offering training classes, companies are recording training materials and providing them on demand via a broadband network service. In the classroom, lectures are now commonly recorded for later study or use at another time and place. Going beyond stored content, teleconferencing and live connections are clearly seen as part of the media mix -a video connection between meeting participants is just another kind of media. We also can't ignore the simple fact that the cost of tools and production is driving an impressive shift in who writes and who reads. Video and audio, once difficult and esoteric, are becoming the tools of choice for a new generation of auteurs with low cycle development time, cheap media costs, and an attitude to bend boundaries. While there are a tools and idioms for creating different kinds of media, there are still a large number of issues in defining new media types, in content creation and designing and using media consisting of several media types integrated in one new medium. In the 4 papers presented here, the topics of discussion range widely across this problem space. Lam, Fisher & Dill’s A Pilot Study of CZTalk: A Graphical Tool for Collaborative Knowledge Work, attempt to make the capture and explicitly represent what is normally tacit and informal—the meta-channel behaviors of people working together at a distance. Their work suggests that becoming literate about the communication channels of collaboration is a key step to effective use of that kind of coordination system. At the same time, Poltrock and Grudin give their current evaluation of the state-of-the-art in Videoconferencing: Recent Experiences and Reassessment. It is becoming increasingly clear to those who live in videoconference environments that the tradeoffs experienced in distance video are subtle and sometimes hard to articulate. Yet, they are real, and potentially important. Here, the authors lay out the tradeoffs and discuss what it means to be videoconference literate in the times ahead. Dealing with large collections of materials is a skill that’s always been a challenge. Yet our computer tools frequently fail to help out. How to deal with a raw collection of text documents remains a challenge. Bauer, Fastrez & Hollan show how Spatial Tools for Managing Personal Information Collections takes advantage of a common organizing tool (space, distance, location) can take advantage of traditional literacy (how to use space to encode relationships) into a new, virtual medium. Finally, Slaney & Russell Measuring Information Understanding in Large Document Collections look at the problem of using common visualizations to help a user comprehend the contents of a large collection. Somewhat surprisingly, the computer-based tools we create to help with the task don’t always do so. Why they fail, and how, touches on the basis of being a literate user of our computational media.