Ich bin ein illiterati: an interview with Mihai Nadin - Cafe Technos - Interview

The original impetus for this article came when a 19-year-old student walked into my office and told me his goal was to work for Dreamworks or ILM as an animator. This student is very smart, talented, and imaginative; a person who in hours can master any piece of software known to humankind. What he hasn't mastered is paper and pencil--he can't draw. It suddenly dawned on me that this young man is going to be afflicted for the rest of his life by the fact that he can't draw well enough to be the animator he wants to be. His education has essentially rendered him visually illiterate.

At the same time, I had been looking at Alan Kay's Squeak project, imagining a world where Squeak was the pencil children used, starting in kindergarten. I was imagining a learning environment where even kindergartners were expected to draw, write, animate, program, and make music as matter of fact. I was imagining an education which could have helped my 19-year-old student get where he wanted to go.

I had no idea how to write this article, so I asked a bunch of people what "a new literacy for new media" might be like. I asked all sorts of folks, until someone finally suggested that I track down either Mihai Nadin or his book, The Civilization of Illiteracy. I had a little trouble finding both: Mihai's book was not in my university library; Amazon.com and Abebooks.com showed it to be out-of-print or offered only used copies. I eventually found Mihai through his email address at Computational Design, but the return email said he was away from the University of Wuppertal, Germany, where he works. Lucky for me that Mihai's bounce-back message announced that he was a visiting scholar at the University of California Berkeley for the 2002 spring term--because, as luck would have it, I received the message just before flying to San Jose to the Game Developer's Conference. I was able to make arrangements to rent a car and drive up to Berkeley to talk to this odd character. In Mihai, I found a man who has been thinking about my 19-year-old student for 20 years. The following is my interview with him. Included in the box on page 7 is publication information about two of his books. I heartily recommend reading his Civilization of Illiteracy--all 800 pages of it (used, if necessary).

The Interview

Mihai, your book proclaims the end of literacy, but in book form. Isn't this a bit of an oxymoron?

Oxymoron? In the sense that I wrote about the end of something that has to do with writing? Actually, I say that this book should not exist and that this is the last book of the civilization of literacy. It is an oxymoron in the sense that we scholars are still analyzing a development to which we belong using the most convenient analytical means we have, that is, through language. But as I state at the book's beginning, I could have conceived of a multimedia publication for presenting my arguments. It is a possibility, but it would have been very difficult because we believe that the new media, the new forms of expression, are easier to master than correct language usage in speaking and writing. At this moment they are not easier. Access to the expression of multimedia communication is easy, but the expression of multimedia is very difficult. We are going through a very interesting moment. There is a whole body of knowledge, well established and more or less accepted, and which is represented by various technologies related to how people write, read, and understand what they read and write. We don't have the equivalents in multimedia.

Humankind is entering an era in the pragmatic progress of its activity and is discovering that language, the so-called natural language we use to speak and write, cannot function as efficiently as it did before this period. The overhead represented by everything involved in the use of one dominant language is such that it negatively affects human efficiency.

So you are right in remarking that I wrote quite a large book in order to maintain that writing is no longer the medium through which we most effectively acquire and disseminate knowledge. But at the same time, I state that there are difficulties with technology that render it less efficient than traditional literacy in disseminating knowledge. So, using writing to report this change was a necessity.

I noticed when I downloaded your book in PDF format that a hypertext format would have made more sense. Your limitation in this instance is that you are a literate person?

Absolutely. In the book, I introduce myself as the product of the civilization of literacy. I am captive to this civilization, and the struggle between what I belong to and what challenges me is not easy.

When you talk about literacy, you often refer to "efficiency" and suggest that literacy was once more efficient than it is now.

Correct. Efficiency is the standard by which we human beings measure the output of whatever we put time, effort, and material into--in carrying on a dialog, in gardening or farming, in manufacturing computers. At this time, and due to the so-called digital means, our level of efficiency is no longer comparable to anything we know from human history. The level of efficiency reached during the Industrial Age was a perfect reflection of the efficiency of literacy. That potential is now exhausted.

Give me an example.

Today, knowledge acquisition from grade school to university is no longer best mediated through literacy but through other means that can now educate more effectively than lectures and texts. When they come home from school, children acquire their knowledge through multimedia, with a strong visual component that is seconded by sound.

To use the Internet today, you have to read its content. So, don't you consider the Internet a literary experience?

No, not when you look at the type of language used on the Internet. It is a meta-language, a mere three to four to five hundred words, that does not qualify as literate. Most people are merely functionally acceptable in that universe. Once you come to a word you do not know, you click and you expect the Internet to explain the word to you. You do not bring your knowledge to the Internet; you expect to get your knowledge from it.

Keep in mind that the Internet that has yet to find its "voice." The most interesting applications of the Internet no longer have anything to do with words. Collaborative work on the Internet, cycles of production driven by the Internet, and even the new forms of commerce driven by the Internet are no longer literacy based. Language usage is rudimentary. It pains me to view news from the best sites on the Internet. If such texts were presented in a traditional classroom, they would be rated a failure.

The New York Times is currently selling a premium service which allegedly completely duplicates the traditional paper. What would you expect to happen to this service?

It will die, and relatively fast, as many have died before. Very, very good writers have tried their luck on the Internet and have failed. The Internet is not a medium for literacy. The newspapers still don't get it.

What informed your original interest in illiteracy?

Twenty years ago I arrived in the United States and went to teach my first class at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). That school claims to be the Harvard of the arts schools and probably is. In the middle of the class I had a crisis. I said to myself: "I will never be able to teach in the United States!" In my lecture I was referring to things that were well known in the environment from which I came, the European environment. It was taken for granted that all university students know these things. I was referring to poets and philosophers and writers you don't need a degree to know about--people like Walt Whitman. But the RISD students kept looking at me and asking: "Who's that?"

At the same time, I noticed that those kids were tremendously successful in whatever they attempted. They were functioning in their society at a level I could not imagine. Even at that early stage of their lives, they had imprinted upon them the ability to cope with a tremendous amount of change. But they could not cope with anything of a permanent nature. That was my crisis. I asked myself: "What is happening here? Am I failing? Do I bring with me something that simply does not belong here? Am I witnessing the emergence of something new?"

What were you teaching?

I was teaching two disciplines: philosophy and semiotics. Slowly, after two semesters, I began introducing computers into my course offerings. And then I worked with Brown University students and with MIT students. They started coming to my classes because we were combining these various forms of expressions, these various literacies, as they have come to be called.

Are you a visual person?

"Visual," meaning what?

If I asked you, "Can you draw?" what would you answer?

I would say I can draw, but that I am not an artist. Am I a designer? No, I am not. What does this mean? I design things in my life, but they do not qualify as design. But I teach design. I teach visual literacy. In 1994, I invented a new program called Computational Design. But in this program, students learn foundational matter, not how to draw with a computer.

When you first went to the RISD, did you move to the students' point of view, or did they have to move to yours?

We each moved toward the other, and that was a wonderful thing. Such give-and-take would have been much more difficult in a European country. The process took time. There was no love lost on either side, but the students and I slowly gained momentum. Three years after I had begun this process at the RISD, Ohio State University approached me regarding an endowed chair in what they called Art and Design Technology.

Okay, so you taught in Europe and you came to the United States to the RISD, and you had a different kind of student?

A different type of student, yes, but it was more than that. The big thing was that the environment was different. It was an environment of innovation, an environment that facilitated change in a way that stopped long ago in Europe. Dealing with change is one of the major problems in Europe, if not the major one.

What makes change so possible here when it isn't possible in Europe?

America does not have the literate history Europe has. It does not have a history that it deems preserving to the extent of holding back progress. It does not have a cultural history that is hard to say "good-bye" to.

In your book you wrote that certain nations have a vested interest in maintaining literacy. What nations are you talking about?

Germany has a vested interest in its own literacy, its own culture; France likewise. Now both of these countries are being challenged within the European Community. Countries such as Holland and Ireland display a more American dynamic.

Do you think it is more American because Holland is more of a mixed country, like the United States, than Germany and France are?

That is one explanation but definitely not the only one. There are countries such as Sweden, Denmark, and Norway that are less captive to literacy than Germany is but still less American than Holland.

You seem to be suggesting that illiteracy is an advantage?

I'm not saying that; I'm saying something else.

But in your book you describe illiteracy as an opportunity.

Advantage and opportunity are two different things. Illiteracy as opportunity means the following: There are certain characteristics of literacy that currently are not an advantage. For example, literacy is not transparent. It keeps people from having access to all that we are entitled to in a democratic society. Literacy is hierarchical and centralized. These and other aspects impact the types of practical activities in which people are involved. Overcoming the limitations of literacy is where the opportunities of illiteracy come in. How do you overcome these limitations? I don't know; but some students, workers, inventors, and entrepreneurs are doing a good job of it.

I am not proclaiming that tomorrow language skills should no longer be taught. My major message is to teach together: traditional literacy, visual literacy, multimedia literacy, literacy in areas where hearing, taste, touch, and smell play a role. Let's give every individual the possibility to unfold according to his or her abilities. Some people are not, due to individual tendencies, inclined toward a literate mode of expression. Others are more inclined. If you start working toward a multitude of expressive forms, you will make it possible for each individual to reach his or her potential. That is something that literacy never allowed. Literacy is a very powerful instrument that demands that the whole society fit into a single model, a single mold--the literate mold. It cannot be done. It never has been done. And although much effort and money are dedicated to that goal, it never will be achieved. Nor should it be. There are many people who will never be able to write correctly. Yet educators keep telling them they have to. Why not give them something that corresponds to their cognitive disposition? This is what I meant by opportunity: multiple literacies.

Have you ever seen students who you think are visually illiterate or musically illiterate because of cognitive reasons or because of the structure of education?

Such individuals are illiterate because they are not being taught. People take it for granted that since everyone has eyes and everyone sees that everyone can deal with the visual. That is not true. The best example is the computer industry, where engineers with eyes assume they can design interfaces without additional training. This is why there are such awful interfaces. We have a huge amount of visual information which is actually misinformation. The technicians are very, very bad at communicating visually, so bad that there is a huge difference between the intended content and that which arrives on the monitor you use for the Internet or for your software programs. Four years ago, I tried to make a difference. Together with a group of good friends, some of them designers, some of them working in the computer industry, I approached Stanford University and asked if it was possible to offer a course or program in visual literacy open to the entire campus. Whatever people study--language, theology, physics, music, education, whatever--let's give them visual culture. They looked at me as if I had landed from another planet.

But you're a professor. I teach also, and if I get students in college who can't write, they are never going to be able to really write other than just a little bit. Their writing is going to be bad because they haven't had the preparation. So, big deal that Stanford institutes a visual literacy program in the freshman year! Is this the place to start visual literacy, in freshman year? You'll have kids coming to campus who have spent 18 years not being visually literate. How can they possibly become visually literate as freshmen?

You are asking some important questions. At what age or cognitive level do we start to form personality? At which level do we start to form various cognitive types that reflect the gamut of human potential? Obviously, not at the college level. If I were offered the chance to do the same at the grade-school level, I would start with the first day of first grade. You'd be surprised how much better students would understand mathematics, because the major problem kids have in mathematics is taught the wrong way, in the literate way. Mathematics and literacy conflict, but there is a relationship between the visual and mathematics. Mathematics has its own language with its own symbolism, its own literacy.

We are talking about the visual--but where does music fit into the scheme?

It has to have its own place in education. Sound, tone, melody, harmony, and tempo are characteristics of human cognition. Rhythm, a sense of time and sequence, and a sense of space, which is a combination of rhythm and time and the visual--music has all of this, along with the "literacy" of notation.

Now, I know you titled your book The Civilization of Illiteracy to make it provocative, but in reality you are talking about a Civilization of Many Literacies, as you say later in the book. On a practical level, how would this sort of approach to a Civilization of Many Literacies work in school systems which already have teachers and librarians? You also suggest that networked learning is a critical aspect of this new model of teaching and learning. Where do the teachers and librarians fit into this model?

I talk about teachers in the sense of change in the condition and function of teaching. It is not enough to say that frontal teaching will disappear. So, What if you teach in the middle of the classroom? Teaching isn't just about topology. I think that the function of the teacher must change fundamentally. In this day and age of change, teachers are still in the position of knowing more than anyone in the room, especially in grade school, so they attempt to pour knowledge into the students' heads. They still follow the factory canning model in the hope of turning out a uniform product. And then they test students to see if they remember what was told. This is all that testing in our day amounts to. In the future, the role of the teacher will be to interface in a process in which there is no longer a homogenous class based upon age group, but rather based upon similar content interests, similar directions. Classes will be constituted on a dynamic level, mainly project-oriented. Learning will be affected by the teacher but not controlled by the teacher. In such a structure, the teacher will not always know more than the students.

Do you grade your students?

No longer. I practice a form I call self-grading, which means the student gives me his or her evaluation along with the exam or project. I do not automatically accept this evaluation. For me, the most interesting aspect of self-grading is whether the student understands what he has done and what he has learned or not learned, whether the student evaluates his own performance along with the subject matter area he has studied.

When you are doing this, is the final outcome an A, a B, or a C?

This is something I cannot avoid because German law does not allow me to give a pass or fail grade. Otherwise, I would automatically use a pass/fail system. German law is so strict that it also tells me exactly how many minutes I can examine a student. You have nothing like this in the United States.

When I came to Berkeley to study, it was the first place I had ever studied that had such an extensive system of pass/fail classes. I took just pass/fail classes for a year and a half at Berkeley. It allowed me to learn what interested me, not just study what a professor wanted me to know. For me it was wonderful.

For me, that is also the beauty of Berkeley. In Germany, a student has almost no choice in what he or she studies. At Berkeley, a student can study what he or she believes is important. This is what education must become.

Toward the end of your book, you talk about the development of a global education network. What do you mean by that?

Much knowledge pertains to repetitive actions. How do you drive a car? How do you fix a bathtub? These are repetitive. We can create a repository of that kind of knowledge--whatever you need whenever you need it. In respect to dynamic knowledge, we need a system that allows for access, learning, and sharing as knowledge unfolds in its many forms all over the world. This is what I mean by a global learning network.

Are you describing online education as it is practiced today, or is this different?

Online education as it is practiced today is an exercise in perversity. Almost nothing on the Internet displays a direction to pursue. I am talking about a hybrid combination between personal networks. For example, assume you and I and seven other people are interested in trout. There is another network interested in health. There is yet another personal network interested in rivers. Our interest in trout can lead to learning based on a project we develop; and we accumulate more knowledge. Now we realize that it is not enough to know just about trout. Trout live in rivers and lakes. There are health issues involved. So our local network--which isn't really local because I live in Germany and you live in Indiana and someone else lives in Japan--this local, personal network starts to interact with other personal networks involved with rivers and lakes and health. New knowledge is being created, accumulated, and shared. This is how I envision such a model. This is the brain's model. Knowledge is constantly being associated and connected over and over in our minds. It works in our minds, and it should work in our networks of learning.

Do you think there are any glimmers of what this might become?

Yes I do. The real leaders are people involved in music. Learning in terms of music is happening on the Web. You can see how the dynamics of these groups works on the Web. They share. Another example is the way design discussions work on the Internet. I am following two discussions at the moment.

Do you think Usenet was an early example of this sort of personal network of information?

Very much so.

I never realized that the noise on Usenet would drive out the usefulness.

Noise isn't an issue. It happens all the time in the university of bricks and mortarboards. And it is always overcome.

Suppose someone is interested in education for multiple literacies and global learning networks--how do they prepare themselves for this eventuality or prepare themselves to cause this eventuality? Would you advise them to march down to Tolman Hall at Berkeley and get into a school of education?

I would not. I would rather they forget studying education as it is taught in universities today. Education is part of the system of the institution, and every institution is focused on its own survival. I have never heard of an institution which decided to close its own doors. An Ed school is not going to hand over the keys tomorrow at 12 and say, "let's do something else." So, I think I would rather encourage the formation of an alternative form of education. I made a group of important guys in Germany dedicated to issues of education very angry when I quoted a metaphor from Thomas Mann. He said the only important issue for humankind is how the cocoon becomes a butterfly. This means that you have to free yourself from one condition before you can reach a new one, a better one. So, my message was, let's blow up the university. The students applauded to the skies; the administrators wanted to lynch me. I received messages from other academics who said that if I worked for a corporation, I would have been fired; you don't say things like that. Yes, we need to get rid of the old institutions.

I don't think a company would fire you. I think they would give you the money to go try something new on the chance that it would possibly succeed.

I would hope so; but I tried to answer about 100 to 150 emails until I noticed a pattern. The professors who wrote them kept mentioning the retirement benefits they would lose under a new system, so they would never give up the status quo, even if what they were doing was not in the students' best interests.

My claim is that the institution of education as we know it is an extension of industrial society. Its necessity today is no longer even being questioned. Everyone recognizes that there are problems with the schools. But just look at all the suggestions made: Schools need more continuity. Let's build on what we have. More of the same will improve education. No one is willing to say that there is a need for a totally different form of human interaction that will; in turn, be reflected in a different way of disseminating the knowledge society needs. When educators realize that there are 10,000 empty seats in a university, filling them will make the situation better. That is not what education is about. Giving someone a piece of paper as proof that he studied something at some time? The media proclaim that people, even children get involved in certain activities--in certain practical experiences, as I prefer to call them--at a much younger age, but educators act as if nothing has changed. People involve themselves in practical experiences completely independent of what they learn in schools. No wonder they ask themselves, "Why waste my time in school? I won't do anything with what they're teaching me." Educators, and not only educators, who are honest about the state of affairs have no choice but to look for alternatives. What should the alternatives be? We are experiencing a situation in which the efficiency of the university lags behind the rest of society. Instead of promoting progress, the university blocks it, especially in teaching.

What hope do you have?

Being the most optimistic person you have ever met, I have the hope that those who need education will start to take their education into their own hands. The new generation has tremendous energy. Every student I meet displays a determination to make a living, because this is so difficult. To be young today is very challenging. Change is so fast that you have to ask why you need to be educated. Today's students need something more.

So, what is it they need? Is the need just personal?

I think the greatest challenge we face today is that each of us be treated as an individual, not as something that we are expected to be. In other words, each of us has a potential, and it is the first time in the history of humankind that that potential can be brought to fruition.

Do you think this is the real measure of education in the 21st century: How far it can go to meet this individual potential of each and every student?

Definitely. I know of no other way to measure success. Standardized tests are a joke. They are only a means through which inert bureaucracies and bureaucrats--in education and in politics--justify themselves.

The Civilization of Illiteracy is published by Dresden University Press (ISBN 3931828387) and is most readily available through Independent Publishers Group, www. ipgbook.com. Also see http://www:code.uni-wuppertal. de/uk/civilization/welcome.html

Project Guttenberg
http://promo.net/pg/
http://promo.net/pg/index.html

MIND--Anticipation and Chaos (volume 10 in the Milestones in Thought and Discovery series)

http://www.code.uni-wuppertal.de/uk/mind/ welcome.html

Thom Gillespie is the Maitre d'Igital of the Cafe TECHNOS. He is also a professor of telecommunications at Indiana University in Bloomington.

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