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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Image: Microsoft Images

I enjoy creating things and so this lesson was fun and interesting for me because I was able to create something while learning about remixes as a digital literacy.

Remixes are quite interesting to me from a social and cultural perspective. This one where Blair and Bush seem to be singing “Endless Love” to each other is funny for its innuendo however it has a much more serious message regarding the British and U.S Iraq War Alliance.

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Image: Microsoft Images

The Machine is Us/ing Us was thought provoking.  Although created in 2007, the issues the video brings up are very relevant today such as copyright, authorship of what is on the web and how humans are using technology to shape their world in a very different way from even a decade ago.

My thoughts on this week’s lesson were on Web 2.0 and how it has affected education in a positive manner.  I want to focus on that as I always hear too much negativity about online social media, blogs and other types of Web 2.0 when it comes to education.

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This was a fun lesson!

I investigated both Comic Life and Bit Strips but I actually created a quick story with Comic Life using my daughter and a trip to Rochester, N.Y. as inspiration. I showed my nine-year old daughter, Mady, Comic Life as well and she’s been happily creating narratives since learning how to use it on her own.  Using images, text, different colours and different types of fonts she is showing positive engagement and an understanding of multimodel literacies (Hughes et al., 2011).

The appeal of creating stories that look like comics is not surprising to me.  What I do find surprising is the immense arsenal of digital skills and multiliteracies learned in such an effort but without the student realizing it. It’s just fun and the learning part becomes secondary, to the student at least.

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We were introduced to Critical Literacy and, of course, I fell in love with this idea. Critical Literacy is a whole new side to literacy.

This idea, which puts the learner in control by giving him/her the ability to interact with texts (images, songs, videos etc.) by questioning what it is he/she is seeing/hearing is quite powerful.  I also feel that it is a way to make the world a better place (if I can use the cliché) by putting those, making the decisions about the messages being put out there, on notice.

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Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

 

“In this article, we attempt to broaden the understanding of literacy and literacy teaching and learning to include negotiating a multiplicity of discourses.  ”
(New London Group, 1996)

As I read the paper “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures” by the New London Group, I kept thinking about the above quote.  Expanding the understanding of literacy is an interesting idea.

At first thought, literacy is simple to understand in its most basic form – the ability to read and write.  But I now know that as a person digs deeper into the concept it becomes more complex; it has many layers of meaning and those meanings can change due to a myriad of factors such as the cultural and social background of a person.  If you mix in the word technology, I think this is where multiliteracies come in.

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