Madison: Mom, can I play Mario after lunch?
Me: No, you played WebKinz for an hour this morning.  I think that’s enough of video games for now.  Why don’t you read?
Madison: Well, if I play video games isn’t that kind of like reading?  You told me it’s a new literacy.
Me: Hmmm… I guess I did.

Image: Microsoft Images

Researching video games consumed my household for a few weeks, much to the delight of my husband and daughter, both avid gamers.   Not only was I preparing for a presentation for the Digital Literacy course but it was the topic for one week for another course I was taking: Adult Education and Digital Technologies.

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We need to think about what new literacies actually mean and how defining and assessing them according to past understandings neglects the nature, practicality and implementation of such real literate experiences for the children in our schools.  Reading books and reading screens are not the same experience, though they may share elements in common.

(Burke, 2009, p. 51)

I think the last sentence of the above quote is the key to understanding why new literacies can not be assessed the same way “old” literacies are evaluated.  Reading a book and looking at a screen to read are definitely two different types of activities.  Research into how people read on their computers has been going on for many years.  For example, the Poynter Institute ran a study in 2007 that tracked how people read newspapers online.

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Image: Microsoft Images

This week I was “forced” to finally put into words what my actual plan is for the research project I hope to run at the John Howard Society of Durham Region soon. That was a good thing.

It was really all in my head and so this exercise forced me to actually write it down and figure out how it is going to work.  The timing was good too because I was writing my Research Ethics Board application for my MEd. research project and so having the information from the exercise was beneficial.

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Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

This topic was quite interesting to me because I spend a lot of time dealing with issues surrounding copyright. I even wrote a blog post on the subject a few months ago, to help  those looking for images to use for their blogs . Unfortunately I couldn’t make the class but was able to contribute to the conversation on the course Ning.

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Image: Microsoft Images

This week’s discussion on E-Literature and Digital Poetics was interesting for different reasons.

It was nice to discover the poem Girls’ Day Out and visually see it come alive though Flash.  While looking for a link to the poem online I stumbled upon the Electronic Literature Collection, which includes Girls’ Day Out.  I went through some of the other projects on this website and I quickly became immersed in these narratives, many created with Flash.  I have used Flash in the past and it is definitely an application that allows for  certain affordances, such as fluidity and non-linearity (Curwood & Cowell, 2011 ), which work perfectly with digital poetry.

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