We’re reading in ways no humans could before. Say I need to read a large text–an essay, blog post, or speech, say–but don’t have the time to read it all. I just want to get the “big picture” as fast as I can. Well, thanks to David Warlick’s 2 cents, I learned about IBM’s Many Eyes program, which explores new visualizations. It would allow be to “see” a larger text’s meaning in a semantic web.
Here’s an example David posts–Obama’s Innaugural address. The language in a text is quantified and arrayed instantly and for free (thank you web 2.0), allowing readers to take away new meanings from the new symbols. Wow!
And Twitter torrents have taught me a new way of reading: in this and through other social networks I can adjust my information stream, filter out the noise and get at the signals that interest me.
My students are becoming adept at playing multi-player real-time collaborative games with kids on the other side of the globe. In addition to learning to interpret the emotional language they hear spoken–English and otherwise–in the game, the students learn to “read” situations political and spatial and to communicate their understandings for their own purposes A lot of literacy is happening that, again, would not have been possible pre 2.0 web.
What other new literacies based on 2.0 tools are you acquiring?
The Wikiness 
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