In this episode, Roz Hussin, an instructional architect, coach and consultant speaks with Doug and Laura about new forms of literacies with fascinating examples from her travels around the world.
Books
- My grandmother told me to tell you I’m sorry by Fredrik Backman
Find all of our guests’ reading recommendations at our The Tao of WAO book club.
Transcript
Important note: this is a lightly-edited AI transcription of the conversation. If you require verbatim quotations, please double-check against the audio!
Laura Hilliger: [00:00:21] Hello and welcome to the Tao of WAO, a podcast about the intersection of technology, society, and internet culture with a dash of philosophy and art for good measure. I’m Laura Hilliger.
Doug Belshaw: [00:00:31] And I’m Doug Belshaw. This podcast season is currently partially unfunded. You can support this podcast and other open projects and products at opencollective.com/weareopen.
Laura Hilliger: [00:00:43] This season of the podcast is looking at the future of new literacies as part of a submission to the Winter 2023 edition of the Journal for Media Literacy. Or, JML as you’ll hear us refer to it, our essential question for this podcast series is how can we define the future of media and information literacy in both theory and practice?
Doug Belshaw: [00:01:06] So today our guest is Roz Hussin, who is an instructional architect, coach and consultant, and we first came across Roz when she contributed to the work on Mozilla’s Web literacy map. Roz travels the world currently in Malaysia, but has lived and worked in many other countries as well. Roz, welcome and our first question to everyone is always what is your favourite book or books?
Roz Hussin: [00:01:32] Thank you, Doug. And because I know you embrace multidisciplinary perspectives, I’m going to navigate this question a little bit differently. So the first thing is I’ll give you my favourite input, which is the movie Forrest Gump. And then because I’m a compliant nonconformist, I’ll share with you what you asked for, which is the book and one that I’ve recently read is the title’s a little long. It’s called my grandmother told me to tell you I’m sorry. So these, these two, the movie and the book, they share something in common. Basically, it’s about people who don’t fit in the norm, but they will not break the rules.
Doug Belshaw: [00:02:15] Interesting, okay. And you see yourself in that in many ways.
Roz Hussin: [00:02:19] Perhaps, like I said, I consider myself a compliant nonconformist.
Doug Belshaw: [00:02:25] Ah, interesting.
Roz Hussin: [00:02:26] Maybe I can give you a little background on that, if you’d like. I also consider myself a third culture kid. A cross culture kid. Yep.
Doug Belshaw: [00:02:35] So spanning two different, two quite different parts of the world, I guess. And that’s why we’re interested in talking to you today about about new literacies and the kind of the future of that in many ways. So we’re talking to people from theoretical backgrounds and practical backgrounds and people who span the two. Could you maybe introduce some of the work that you’ve done and are currently doing in this area? Because that will help give some context for listeners.
Roz Hussin: [00:03:03] Well, it stems back to the fact that if a person is intersectional in their very being, you know, the culture that they grew up in is from multiple perspectives, is from different different areas geographically and also different parts of the social, economic, society or whatever criteria that you consider people to come from. Um, I think I definitely I fall into the category of being from everywhere and nowhere. So the background of work that I’ve done is also quite intersectional. I am an architect by profession, the kind that builds buildings, you know, bricks and steel and glass and all of that. But, um, I did go back to school twice. And my second profession is as an instructional designer. So I build people. Um, and the context of that, if I were to say, a parallel between the building of physical entities versus the building of humans, it requires a different kind of skill set. So that that would be that would be the context. And I’ll wait for you to ask me more questions before I go more deeply into that.
Doug Belshaw: [00:04:20] I know that you’ve got a lot of examples that you want to give in the in the little introductory chat we had before recording, I know that there were some fascinating examples that you wanted to have a chance to talk about. Um, but Laura’s got the next question. Do you want to go through that? Laura?
Laura Hilliger: [00:04:35] Um, so, Roz, you were just talking about intersectionality, and we’re actually using a series of lenses to sort of help us explore this key question around the future of media and information literacy. And the lenses that we’ve chosen are race, gender, AI and geography. And I was wondering if you could talk to us a little bit about how those four lenses sort of intersect for you and what you think that they mean in terms of like the future of literacies.
Roz Hussin: [00:05:06] So when I think about intersectionality of geography and different demographics of people, um, perhaps it’d be easier if I share with you some of the work that I’ve done. Maybe the beginning would be way back about ten, 15 years ago was probably the first time that I was introduced to the concept of technology being a solution for people who don’t have access. And it’s ironic because the very people who don’t have access to education or to modern facilities, like the Native Americans, I was working in the Indigenous Roots program for about eight years, way back in 2010, 2011 onwards. I helped people to become connected to the. Graphic distance between the teachers and the students, and also between the whole learning community and the resources that they’re connected to the schools or the university. And fast forward 15 years later, I’m again involved with different indigenous people, this time in Southeast Asia, in Malaysia, the semi tribes up in the mountains and during Covid, the only way they able to survive was to learn about how to use mobile learning tools in order to produce documents that they needed to fight for their land rights. They’ve been able to learn how to communicate because of the wonderful tools that are available to them. And some of these tools, you know, the tools that convert audio to text and can spontaneously translate from one language to another. It’s really impressive to see how people accelerate in their learning in order to survive.
Doug Belshaw: [00:07:02] So what I find fascinating about what you’ve just been talking about with indigenous people is that they don’t necessarily have to have what we would consider to be kind of regular literate practices. So being able to produce text and, and read text, to be able to be literate in their society as it, as it required now. So you gave the example of being able to maybe use tools or record things that shouldn’t be happening on their land and use that as admissible evidence in court. These are literate behaviours, but they’re not what we would traditionally consider to be literate behaviours. And as that, as that, as those literate practices are evolving as they always do, sometimes it means that people and tribes and communities end up leapfrogging entire literate practices that maybe we in the West, or in kind of wealthier global North Nations have seen as quote unquote, normal because they don’t need those literate practices because they’re going straight to something else. And that is absolutely fascinating.
Roz Hussin: [00:08:11] Absolutely. It’s from cavemen to cyber dumb, you know, and, you know, it’s not just people from the rural or outback areas. I have seen this during my work when I worked in China for a bit, um, I find fascinating and amusing. I was walking from the train station to the office, and my colleague, who was walking right next to me, very nonchalantly said, hey, by the way, do you like bubble tea? And like, yeah, I like bubble tea. It’s on the sidewalk minding our own business, going from the train station. And not more than 3 to 5 minutes after she asked me the question, some guy just walks right up to us and hands us a cup of bubble tea each, and I’m like, whoa, why did that guy just give us a cup of bubble tea? And my colleague said, well, that’s because I ordered it while we were walking. So real time locators is is a common thing. So, you know, that’s a different type of literacy. That’s nothing to do with reading or writing or, you know, literacy that we know of. It’s just knowing that it’s all right to give out locator information mean in the Western world, you’d say, that’s private. You know, where I am is is a private security issue. But, you know, in other cultures it’s more important to have speed and efficiency and convenience. So commerce and and expectations of how services are delivered has absolutely changed in different parts of the world. And that’s beyond amazing if you ask me.
Doug Belshaw: [00:09:49] Yeah. I mean, it really is. We still don’t have things like Deliveroo and Uber Eats in the town that I live. And so for people to be able to walk along and have things thrust and thrust into their hands after ordering on the mobile.
Roz Hussin: [00:10:04] I mean you don’t you don’t even need to put in an address anymore to order food. I mean, that’s ridiculous, you know?
Doug Belshaw: [00:10:10] Well, that is I mean, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there in terms of. So I remember when my dad was in the Middle East, it was very difficult to send things to him because the way that we have kind of Western postcodes and street numbers and stuff didn’t really correspond to where he was living in kind of a desert town in the, in the UAE. And so it was very difficult to send things. And so those kind of literate practices predicated on things like sending letters and parcels just didn’t map onto that world and what you’re describing there and what you’ve pulled out of that is instead of a fixed place that I’m going to send a thing to, the things that I am creating are temporary, i.e. the bubble tea, and they’re being delivered to a temporary address, which is me walking down the street.
Roz Hussin: [00:10:58] Yeah, but think about the more important part of this. It’s not just about what’s able to be done, but what are the prerequisite skills and knowledge that people need to have in order to live in this type of world? The trust that you need to have in the system. The ability to ensure that your handheld devices are secure. The kind of level of competency you need to have in ensuring data security for yourself, and ensuring that you’re constantly, even something as simple as making sure you have enough battery supply. Those are sort of prerequisite fundamental individual knowledge skills, which we currently do not have in our education system, the K-12 or or whatever traditional primary, secondary and tertiary education that we have in the Western world is absolutely inadequate to prepare us for what skills we need in this new, fast paced world.
Laura Hilliger: [00:11:59] I find this story really interesting, and I find myself a little bit confused about how how it actually works, because it seems like the person that delivered you the bubble tea had to recognise you, which means that your colleague who ordered it had to provide some sort of a description about who you are, where you were.
Roz Hussin: [00:12:19] No, it’s all real time. It’s just real time. When you allow your device to be tracked.
Laura Hilliger: [00:12:25] Right. And so I take it it wasn’t a very busy street.
Roz Hussin: [00:12:29] Oh, it was absolutely busy downtown Shanghai. We’re talking about hundreds of people on the sidewalk. Exactly.
Laura Hilliger: [00:12:37] So? So hundreds of people on the sidewalk that have the same GPS.
Roz Hussin: [00:12:43] I don’t know. They seem to have a way where if your your phone is right next to the other phone, I mean, I, I use a, um, you know, you call you know, every country has their own sort of transportation and, and I’m currently in Malaysia and there’s this thing here, it’s called grab. I guess it’s like an Uber. And, you know, I see the cars that are coming, you know, around the neighbourhood, and, and I can tell which car is, is, is showing up to pick me up. I mean, yeah, there’s a little description on it, but you know, you see the dot on the screen moving and they see the dot of you moving. And they know if you’re not where the machine says you are, you know, and you can get scolded by the driver if you’re not standing where you say you are.
Doug Belshaw: [00:13:29] But I think I think you’re absolutely right in kind of talking about, you know, there’s the technology and then there’s the literate practices around the technology, and the technology can be writing on a page. The technology can be what you’ve just described in terms of mobile technology, the technology to kind of tee up another example, which I know that you wanted to talk about, can be real time translation between two people who don’t speak the same language.
Roz Hussin: [00:13:57] Yeah, this one is a personal experience for me. I was in a different part of China, and I thought I was minding my own business doing my evening exercise. I’m a martial arts practitioner, and usually I love enjoying a sunset and sort of doing my meditative tai chi sort of semi-dark. And I was just standing there doing my exercise, and suddenly a policeman runs up to me and he reaches for his pocket and I thought, My God, what did I do wrong? He was yelling at me and I had no idea what he was saying. My Chinese is as good as my Russian, which I don’t speak either of them. And and instead of pulling out a weapon or some kind of reprimanding device, he pulls out his cell phone. And I’m just wondering, what is he asking for my phone number? And instead he he just kind of did something on the screen, and then he put the, you know, the phone right up to my face. And the phone talked to me in English because he could tell I couldn’t speak Chinese. And and the phone was telling me that, you know, what I was doing is illegal because you’re not allowed to do martial arts at night because, you know, they deem it as a, you know, some kind of dangerous mafia gangster type activity. But anyway, I had no clue how to answer him. And he, you know, he just kind of pointed, you know, whether I have a phone, I’m like, oh, yeah, I can do that too. So there we were, two people. We weren’t talking to each other because we couldn’t communicate in a common language. But my phone spoke to him in Chinese and his phone spoke to my phone in English, and that went on for about 15 minutes till we found a solution to, you know, me not getting arrested. It’s incredible the skills that you need to have to be able to function when there is an environment that has moved beyond what you’re familiar with, it’s incredible. The level of accelerated learning you have to go through is quite daunting but exhilarating.
Doug Belshaw: [00:16:00] And that’s that isn’t just having existing literate practices, that is having the flexibility to learn new ones on the fly as well.
Roz Hussin: [00:16:10] Oh yes. Yes, that’s right. And so I, I call it spontaneous learning or rapid refocusing. A lot of people, you know, they don’t like the word multitasking because yeah, I mean, the human brain doesn’t really multitask, but we can teach ourselves to do rapid refocusing. And that is what is necessary when you are confronted in a situation they knew spontaneously or seemingly spontaneously, and then assessing the situation that you’re in and adjusting on the fly, and that rapid refocusing is something that’s a basic need, I think, now. So it’s almost like we humans have to become like the artificial intelligence that we are working with. And that’s a skill that we need to to look at. I think the first question you asked me, Doug, which is what is my favourite book? And I answered you my favourite movie and a book that I’ve read recently, both of those stories. What I really like about it is that they depict people in our current present day society who are outliers, people who we feel are a little odd or they have a different way of looking at life, or maybe they’re born with a different way of thinking, for whatever way, whatever reason. But these outliers, they are survivors. They have always been the outliers. The world is not their oyster, and so they have had to. Create coping mechanisms that allow them to function in their own world, their own culture, their own standard operating procedure. But at the same time, even though they don’t fit into the world that is around them, they survive. So that’s why I said by being a nonconformist, but a compliant one. And that is actually an important skill to be able to not have to change the world, but to adapt to it and allow both worlds to exist simultaneously. I think that’s the skill that we need to have in facing the new literacies out there that are needed.
Laura Hilliger: [00:18:22] Yeah, there’s this there’s this really interesting tension here around what, what the literature and academia is showing us around, you know, how people are using technology or what technology is doing to society in terms of, you know, our ability to focus and our attention. And I was just thinking a little bit about about how we use technology to distract ourselves. And I think that that the this rapid refocusing as a, as a skill that can come off the back of, of distraction or come off the back of the our attention being in some way funnelled a different way is a is a really interesting way to sort of think about the the positive, the positive aspects of our own attention spans and our own distractions.
Roz Hussin: [00:19:13] So absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I think at the moment there’s so much hype, negative hype about children not having an attention span focus. I think we need to pause and not judge that because there are kids and adults who who all these years, you know, we say, oh, they’ve got ADHD or they’ve got Asperger’s or they’ve got some kind of whatever on the spectrum and they’re not able to focus. But guess what? These people, they have survived and many of them thrive and they have no problem being in the normal world. It’s us, normal people, or you normal people or other people who are normal claim to be normal, who seemingly have a problem with the type of people who can survive and can cope in an ever changing world. And so maybe we need to take a step back and stop judging that and learning to to value different perspectives and to understand that different people come with their own sets of skills and values and think maybe, maybe we could learn from the outliers of the world, you know, because the skills that they’ve had all these years are suddenly now very valuable. And I think the, the norm or the average person has never bothered to go that way because because they’re the majority. And why bother changing the majority, right. In the past. But now that we can see some minorities, some nonconformists, some outliers, they are not fazed by these changes in the world. I mean, look at Covid. Everybody was sort of screaming murder when when they had to adapt to working from home. But look at those people who’ve been working from home ever since the beginning of the internet. I mean, Doug, you and I, Laura, we were some of the pioneers back in the day, the bleeding edge. And we didn’t have much of a problem dealing with working from home because we we already had our bleeding edge back then.
Doug Belshaw: [00:21:18] Well apart, apart from the biscuit tin, that was the main problem for me when I started working from home. But I wanted to kind of just go back quickly to what you were talking about in terms of ADHD and that kind of thing. So notwithstanding the very real things that happen in people’s brains, which make us different from one another, one of the books that I read when I was just training to teach, actually, was a book by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, which is teaching as a subversive activity, which talks about how you learn the literate practices aren’t just the academic practices that Laura was talking about before. They’re the kind of lived practices like you learn to do school, you learn how to operate in that kind of hidden curriculum. Yeah.
Roz Hussin: [00:22:03] The hidden curriculum behind it all.
Doug Belshaw: [00:22:05] Yeah. In the same way that you’ve talked kind of about being in different countries and what different normal behaviours are in those countries, different literate practices, what’s entirely a regular thing to do, like walk down the street and order some bubble tea to come and be kind of dropped to you as you’re walking along. So what I just wanted to pull out of that part of the conversation was that we identify literate practices, and then we almost freeze them and solidify them for the purposes of formal education, and then we wrap additional practices around those, and then we talk about the whole thing as. Being education, and sometimes it’s a bit of a straitjacket and it’s a little bit too solidified to actually help young people and older people for that matter. Universities, lifelong learning to operate effectively in a very fast changing world.
Roz Hussin: [00:22:58] I absolutely agree. And, you know, some of the more recent things that I’ve learned have come from the most unimaginable sources. And you don’t have to go to a foreign country to see how different cultures can, can teach you new things. I’ve interacted a lot with foreign workers in different countries. So you’ve got sort of people from Myanmar and Bangladesh working in Malaysia, or you’ve got people from Mexico working in the US. So you’ve got people from Australia working in Malaysia. You know where people are cross country working, especially now post Covid. Everybody is work from home or, you know, working not in the same country and just working online. So the example that I’d like to give is the migrant workers that I’ve met, and not just in one country, in almost any country that I’ve met migrant workers and they’re not able to speak the local language. They spontaneously just jury rig whatever mobile phone devices using the auto translate tool. And, you know, the auto translation tool exists in more than just the the cell phone, WhatsApp and texting or Facebook, MS teams has an auto translate button. And even in my corporate training program nowadays as I’m training people across the globe and these are high level, you know, CEO level people, they didn’t even realise that there’s such tools of auto translation. And so the the method of doing work nowadays to use these tools, either just record your voice when you’re unable to type fast enough and then have the machine auto translate the transcription of your your audio voice, or to just allow the AI on the the system, the platform to translate for you, and then to have the skill to know when not to trust the auto translation, because maybe there’s some grammar errors or some audio discrepancy because the sound accent is different. But those are some new skills that I’ve spontaneously learned, had to learn, and I learned it from migrant workers and just, you know, people on the street. So you don’t need to go to school anymore. Guess that’s the fundamental thing that I’m trying to point out. We need to start learning from the university of life.
Laura Hilliger: [00:25:22] I think something that I want to point out here that I think is really important when we talk about the future of of literacies and just based on on what you were just talking about there with auto translate, and I’m just sitting here thinking a little bit about some of the things that are lost with the development of the or with the need for these new skills. So I’m as somebody who learned a foreign language as an adult, I moved to a country where I couldn’t speak the language before. You know, auto translate was really, really a thing. And, you know, Humboldt said a Wilhelm Humboldt, not Alexander, that you could only really understand a culture once you can speak the language. And as somebody who had learned, you know, learned a second language as an adult, I definitely think that that is true. And I think that there’s something here around the, you know, the loss of a depth of understanding. And I wonder how that kind of plays in to the to the fact that we do want people to develop these new skills. We do want to encourage people to live in the world in a way that, you know, is is more accessible, that helps them to have more learning experiences in an easier way. But how do we actually keep some of the cognitive gymnastics that happen when you actually struggle to understand things, or when you struggle to read things? Because I think there’s like a critical, critical thinking piece that can sometimes get lost when you just use Google Lens to translate the menu, instead of thinking about how the language looks or feels or what it might mean.
Roz Hussin: [00:26:57] So, Laura, I invite you to pause for a second. And this is why when I do coaching to my students, I remind them that the word literacy. Unfortunately, in the modern world, we forget the original meaning of literacy. There’s more to literacy than just linguistics. Linguistics is not literacy. It’s just one example. There’s there’s, you know, body language, there’s nuances. And the online world has its own language literacy, too, for example. And, you know, I’m usually very passionate talking about this because, you know, that’s what my whole thesis was about, which, you know, I remember when I. Defended it. People laughed at me. But now it’s not a laughing matter anymore. Think about like when you send an email, there’s an expectation of an email to be responded, maybe a day later, maybe two days later. But if you send a text message, the expectation is maybe within an hour, sometimes within five minutes. So just this small example that’s literacy. The knowledge of rules and protocols. When two parties or three parties communicate, that’s literacy as well. So it’s not just language in the traditional sense. So you may lose quote unquote lose the traditional or conventional comprehension of communication. But if you if you open your mind to the possibilities that there are other types of literacy, that the normal old fashioned people like you and me who are born in the olden days, we have not begun to learn the new literacies.
Roz Hussin: [00:28:42] But if you talk to some of the the younger generation or even the older people who have embraced the new technologies, like those people who went from cavemen all the way to Cyberworld, who jumped a few generations of technology. To them, it’s like no big deal, because they know what that literacy is. It’s those of us who are still holding on to the old definition of literacy. We we feel that we’ve lost something. But I think if we dare to open our eyes to the possibility of new ways of communicating that are not yet apparent to us, that that would be wonderful. I mean, just think of our great grandparents time when they didn’t even have phones to them, picking up a phone to talk to somebody that wasn’t personal at all. But to us, that’s normal, because we know that we can have an audio podcast and not see the face, and it’s still the human talking. So in the same way you and I were not used to the new one, you know, the new literacy.
Doug Belshaw: [00:29:45] I think that’s a great point, was so, you know, Antonio Gramsci said that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. And a lot of what you’ve described in terms of literacy practices are to some extent generation based, based on kind of age, but then literate practices aren’t bound by kind of what chronological age you are, but rather when you adopt different practices and things. So, for example, I was talking to a neighbour the other day and they they used the phrase party line, which I’ve only ever heard Americans talk about, you know, like in terms of being on the same line as a neighbour and having to get off the line and potentially your neighbour being able to listen in to your your phone calls.
Roz Hussin: [00:30:29] I grew up with that.
Doug Belshaw: [00:30:31] Yeah. I can remember the next stage of that, which was sitting on the stairs, talking on the phone, trying to keep my voice down so that people didn’t hear me talking to a girl or my, you know, a friend or whatever. Whereas now, of course, you know, you have your individual phone calls. We no longer have a landline because there’s no particular need for one, etcetera. But I also wanted to kind of chart the development of things like read receipts. So you talked about emails there. You still can. It used to be something that happened, you know, you could request a read receipt, and then you had the option of whether to send that read receipt or not. Same with text messages back in the day. But now one of the literate behaviours I wanted to get to was, you know, my daughter is 12 and she is already quite kind of subtle in terms of that double tick read receipt kind of thing on WhatsApp and signal and whatever, and how to kind of play the game of whether they’ve seen something before someone sees something else and all this kind of stuff.
Roz Hussin: [00:31:30] Do you know that there’s now apps that can simulate those, or to hold it off so that you can actually read your messages and not let your the other person know whether you’ve read it or not. So there are apps now that can counter the tools in the original app. So so it just goes to show there’s a different level of literacy going on there, to the point that people are inventing apps to counter what those devices are doing.
Doug Belshaw: [00:32:00] That does not surprise me at all. And the, the, the privacy element, which has been kind of running throughout this conversation about to what extent do you give up some notion of people knowing more about you than you would usually be comfortable with, in order so that you can get some kind of benefit to you? So that might be bubble tea, but it might also be to quell the anxiety that you’ve got because your kid or your aged relative or a friend or a partner has gone somewhere and you want to make sure they’re okay. Like, to what extent do we kind of trade these things? And to what extent is that part of literacy? That that knowledge about what constitutes public, private and kind of data that you’re giving up to corporate people or the government as well.
Roz Hussin: [00:32:52] Let me give you a real example that’s even more scary than the the question that you’ve posed. What you’re posing is just privacy. Maybe, maybe there’s an embarrassment as, as the worst case scenario there. But let me just tweak that example a little further into sort of a doomsday terrible scenario. If we don’t learn to embrace these new literacies, if we continue to say, that’s not for me, I prefer where I currently am, we stand to put ourselves at serious risk. And so here’s an example. I noticed my my mom and my stepdad, you know, they they go to the clinic as a as a senior citizen, you have to go like every six months, every three months get your check-up whatever. And here in Malaysia, everything is digitised. You no longer use anything in the written form. Ever since Covid, everything is paperless, so everything has a QR code. You go in and even just to get a number to wait in line to see the doctor, you have to open your app on the phone and scan the QR code at the the doctor’s place and then your phone, which can no longer be shared with another person each individual person must have their own phone, otherwise they cannot get the services from the facility. And then even if there’s a printout like the actual label from the pharmacy, so that you know that the medication that you’re picking up at the pharmacy, it’s got a QR code on it. And because everything is codified with QR codes, here comes the scary part. If the person receiving this medication with the QR code printed on it, after you’re done with the medication, then what happens? You throw away that plastic piece or that paper envelope, but another person can pick it up, and if they have the right app, they now have access to your name, your Social security number, your passport number, your birth date, all that private data. And that’s why, like right now, I know in Malaysia they’re putting up a new law. I think it’s being tabled in Parliament at the moment to heighten data security, because that’s what’s happening. People are not realising that, you know, just by simply going through someone’s trash bin. Lots of people are getting scammed in the banks because because your private data is right there on every label.
Doug Belshaw: [00:35:23] That’s incredible. Yeah. And it just goes to show how the ultra technocratic solutions that often companies like to sell to governments really do require that last mile training for people, the equivalent of that in the UK, because everyone’s kind of football, soccer, mad is digital ticketing being brought in for for funds and going to football matches and some having not even smartphones and like not being able to get into the ground and this causing them huge amounts of pain and things, we’re going to have to wrap up. So there’s just a kind of a wrap up question we wanted to ask, just in case we we haven’t covered everything that we’d prepared. So that is the kind of key essential question for this podcast series, which is about how we see the future of media and information literacy in theory and practice. Is there anything else that you wanted to say Roz before we finish up?
Roz Hussin: [00:36:19] Well, I’d like to say that it’s important for each one of us to just pause and. Be non-judgmental. Take a look at actually what’s happening around us. If you see anything that irks you or you know, it just makes you want to go, no, I don’t want this or that’s terrible, just pause for a second and withhold your judgement, because there are a lot of things that we do not yet know. And it it’s very dangerous to just pass judgement on what we do not yet know, because sometimes those things that we’re not familiar with, or that other people seem to do, that we’re not familiar with. Well, maybe there’s a solution in there that we need to start learning how to do, no matter how unsavoury it may seem or unintuitive it may seem. Just pause and don’t judge. Be more accepting of the other, you know, because you’ll you’ll never know that somebody else’s way of doing something will be the way of the future.
Doug Belshaw: [00:37:27] That’s great. That’s a great lesson to to finish on. And it comes from all of your experience in different cultures and different sectors and things. So, Roz, thank you very much for contributing to season eight of this podcast, which is for the Journal for Media Literacy Winter 2023 Special Edition. If people want to find out more about you and your work, or follow you anywhere on on social media, where should they go?
Roz Hussin: [00:37:52] They can look for me in LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, I live online.
Doug Belshaw: [00:37:58] Excellent. Well, thank you again and cheers for now!