After Gutenberg

Have you noticed how you read differently than before, read more online, read different things, for shorter periods at a time and often with more choices to skip a page, seek out a link, and pursue a thought in another book, another article, or a newspaper? And if you are an educator brought up in an age before Snapchat and Instagram maybe you have noticed how you have an altogether different approach to pictures and tho sharing than your students do? In short, many things are changing: Coping with then in terms of how they affect teaching and learning is not a technology issue and neither is it necessarily a pedagogical one. It is an invitation to our making more of our sociological imagination.

From the sociological point of view, the future of learning begs the study of the future of reading and writing, the role of the written word and the modalities in which we read and write. And with it follows an interest in institutions of publishing, of sharing, of distribution of written knowledge – what a media studies perspective might be labeled as “the media in society”.