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A secondary English and film teacher offers suggestions for using technology to enhance students' critical engagement with Shakespeare.
This past November, Wired's resident genius Kevin Kelly wrote a groundbreaking article that was published in the New York Times magazine. His thesis is that we are experiencing a tectonic shift regarding what we call literacy. According to Kelly, "We are now in the middle of a second Gutenberg shift-from book fluency to screen fluency, from literacy to visuality." He sees this as a result of the dramatic changes in technology in the last few years that have led to a decrease in "user asymmetry." By this he means that the gap between making a film and viewing a film was infinitely larger than, for example, that between writing a book and reading a book. With the arrival of inexpensive camcorders and even video capability in cell phones, easy-to-use editing software such as iMovie and Windows Movie Maker, and instant universal distribution through YouTube and similar sites, we are coming to the point where we can create and manipulate images as easily as we do words. As an English teacher for over two decades, I am not quite ready to bid auf wiedersehen to Herr Gutenberg just yet. But the question does remain: As teachers of literature, how do we approach this transition to visuality?
As part of a column that appeared in these pages four years ago, I described how I have my students create movie trailers as a concluding activity for a Shakespeare play (LoMonico 118). This is a tried-and-true lesson and always popular among teachers in the Folger workshops I've led. But technical advances in digital filmmaking in the last five years now allow us to move beyond assignments like the trailer. In this article, I want to share a couple of these ideas that have worked well. They are techniques that draw on the students' sense of visual literacy and awareness of the filmmaking process to stretch their thinking about...