Are MOOCs great because they give us new literacies, which are actually not the same as the old-fashioned "literacy"?

Geoff Cain at his blog criticizes my article on MOOCs in the Boston Review.  Cain complains that I am not an expert on the educational theory surrounding.MOOCs.  This is true.  MOOCs only became a big deal in education within the last couple year and only came to my attention a few months ago.  My area of specialization is not theory of education.  So I am catching up quickly.  There is so little time, however, and one has to speak quickly since the threat to higher education is immediate.  Some MOOC promoters are arguing for reduction of faculty by fifty per cent in the next five to ten years. So we only have that much time before higher education as we know it is over.

Cain notes that I do not distinguish between different types of MOOCs.  Yet I make important distinctions between types of MOOCs in the opening paragraph of my article.  The MOOCs I am concerned about are not the ones that are there primarily for autodidacts and are not for credit.  I am concerned about MOOCs that are being used to replace teachers in higher education.  This is the real point of MOOCs.  This is how MOOCs will save money.   Coursera and the other companies would not exist if there was not money to be made somewhere in all of this.

Cain writes, "I hate to tell Leddy this, but literacies are changing. I do a lot of writing, but my work depends more on my ability to collaborate with others and the creation of intelligent networks than my ability to write a ten page paper."

This kind of comment reminds me of when people would say in the 1960s that watching TV gave one a new kind of literacy.  Sure, one could say this in a way.  But even though someone could learn a lot by watching TV, literacy was still literacy, i.e. a matter of being able to read and write.  Watching TV doesn't help you much with either. 

Cain tells us that he does a lot of writing, and I do not doubt that Cain himself is literate.  I suspect that his literacy came from actually taking classes from live teachers in a university.  Still, even if he is an autodidact himself and learned how to write from reading the writings of others, those others probably learned how to read and write in a formal educational context.  Even autodidacts depend on the educational institutions they avoid.

What I want to ask, however, is whether Cain's literacy changed because he uses a computer to write and post?  I doubt it.  More puzzling is his comment about his "ability to collaborate with others."  There is a long tradition of co-writing articles, books and so forth.  There is no change in literacy between writing an article by oneself and writing it with someone else.  The philosophy department at SJSU co-wrote out letter criticizing Sandel.  Our literacy did not change because of this.

Cain also wants to contrast collaborative work with the ability to write a ten page paper.  I wonder why the length of the paper is so important to him.  My students are required to write pieces of various lengths, from under one page to as long as ten pages.  Graduate students are expected to write even longer pieces.  Writing at greater length requires greater organizational skill and deeper understanding of a subject matter.  (Part of the attack on the ten page paper may belong to some belief that in the age of tweets, the more complex literacy needed to write about something in depth is no longer needed.)  In any case, whatever literacy is required to write a good ten page paper or a good one page paper is the same as whatever literacy is required to write something collaborative.

I suspect all of this talk about "changing literacies" is just a excuse for rejecting the very notion of literacy.   Perhaps Cain doesn't think that it is important any more to learn how to read and write critically and creatively.  That would be too bad, since if the view was widely held we could well be said to be entering into a new dark ages.

So is "creation of intelligent networks" supposed to replace reading and writing?  Well, whatever "creation of intelligent networks" is, it is not a matter of literacy any more than creation of a good pot is.  Creating good pots is a wonderful skill....but it would be a great mistake to claim that any skill is a "literacy."   (I wonder whether I am part of Cain's "intelligent network" or does an intelligent network only consist of people who agree with each other?)