This semester, I’m teaching a graduate class called Literacy and Language Development. Most of my students are elementary teachers, with a few graduate students thrown into the mix. Today, we spent the class exploring new literacies. For the first part of class, we went into the computer lab and just took some time to search through what’s out there, from fan fiction and blogs, videogames to machinima, Twitter to Flickr, vi.sualize.us to del.icio.us, nings to wikis. (And while this has some broken links, it lists many Web 2.0 technologies).
Next, we returned to our classroom and spent some time talking about these. For many of us in academia, Web 2.0 technologies are our world – we tweet, we blog, we link, and this is how we live. I remember at this year’s Wisconsin Council of Teachers of English conference, William Kist from Kent State gave a keynote on new literacies. But afterward, many questions from teachers persisted: “But what are new literacies? If I don’t know how to use these technologies, how can I ever teach them? And what will happen to print literacy – will that be lost?”
Even though many of my students were unfamiliar with these new technologies and new literacy practices, we were able to talk about the “new ethos” (Lankshear and Knobel) that accompanies them. We looked critically at their elementary school’s technology practices. In one school, teachers weren’t required to use the computer lab at all – and if they did, there were completely on their own. In many other schools, students visited the computer lab once or twice a week and primarily used KidPix. (My own fourth grade son is learning about online databases and Boolean logic at his school, much to my delight).
Much of the time, we position new literacies as being marked by teacher resistance or antiquated models of schooling – but maybe we need to focus on issues of access and advocacy instead. At the Games+Learning+Society Conference, we’ll once again offer scholarships for PK-16 teachers to attend. In talking with some other members of the program committee, I suggested that perhaps we need to include a session on advocacy. After all, what better time to talk about it than when you have teachers, researchers, and industry experts in the same place?
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