APLING678 Week 8 - New Literacies

Guiding Questions:

• How would you define literacy in the traditional sense?
• How do the traditional definitions of literacy compare with the new definitions of literacy(ies)?
• In what ways are the traditional and new definitions impacted by technology (namely Web 2.0) and other forms of meaning making?
• What implications and challenges should be considered with regards to the idea of new literacies?

TASKS:

Readings:

• e-Reserves: (Knobel &) Lankshear (2007) Sampling the “new” in new literacies
• e-Reserves: Reinhardt, J. & Thorne, S. (2011). Chapter 8 Beyond comparisons: Developing digital L2 literacies. In Arnold & Ducate (eds.)
• Weblink: Gee, J.P. (nd). A situated socio-cultural approach to literacy and technology (Retrieve fromhttp://jamespaulgee.com/admin/Images/pdfs/Literacy%20and%20Technology.pdf ) 
• Weblink: Moayeri, M. (2010). Classroom uses of social network sites: Traditional practices or new literacies? Digital culture & Education, 2(1):25-43. (Retrieve fromhttp://www.digitalcultureandeducation.com/cms/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/dce1029_moayeri1.pdf ) 
• e-Reserves (OPTIONAL): Thorne, S. (2008). Mediating technologies in second language learning.
• Watch this YouTube video by David Crystal https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Substantive Post

Week 8 Discussion Post: Traditional Literacy IS the New Literacy

“Literacy” comes from the Latin “litteratus”, meaning “marked with letters” ("Merriam Webster," 1994, p. 680).  Before reading any of the assignments this week, and perhaps even after digesting the first three assigned readings, I would have defined literature as good books, and traditional literacy as reading and writing (stressing the importance of understanding what one is reading, and being able to make one’s writing understandable). But when I got to the fourth article, Maryam Moayeri made me realize that I wasn’t looking back far enough. I was defining traditional literacy based on MY personal tradition – what I grew up with. Her first paragraph made me see it differently. In a way, our “new” literacies are just bringing us back to where we began and expanding on our methods of relaying information before the days of the written word. For much of human history, storytelling was oral. Art and music and interpretive dance were once key components of a story; it wasn’t entirely up to the words of a story to convey the meaning (p. 25). And now, thanks to the Internet, we are coming back to a place where education is more collaborative and “new literacy” includes more than just words on a page. This is an exciting time to be in education. For the first time in over 100 years, educators are exploring the idea of flipping or redesigning the classroom, of “moving away from the teacher as knowledge container and provider and shifting to a more collaborative and active learning mode” (Moayeri 2010, p. 27).

The social aspects of Web 2.0 and all the technologies that have developed along with it have enabled us to achieve literacy in more integrated, multimodal ways (Reinhardt and Thorne, p. 261). Lankshear and Knobel wrote that the technical stuff is more of a “contingent enabler” than a “prime mover” (p. 21). Technology did not create our new literacies; it just enabled us to do things we were already doing more efficiently and more collaboratively. New literacies, in the wake of Web 2.0, are an ever-expanding category. They include “blogging, fanfic writing, manga producing, meme-ing, photoshopping, anime music video (AMV) practices, podcasting, vodcasting, and gaming,” to list a few (Lankshear and Knobel 2007, p. 6).  I have a daughter who reads and write fanfiction, a son who loves modding in Minecraft, and a friend who makes AMVs. Before this week, I had not considered those last two items as “literacies”. As a fairly literal person (pun and use of the same root word intended), I almost always thought of literacy as having to do with traditional reading and writing, and I occasionally expanded my understanding of the word to include “having knowledge or competence” ("Merriam Webster," 1994, p. 680), for example, “computer literacy” is knowing one’s way around a computer. But I had never before viewed my son’s ability to make sense of a Pokemon card as a type of literacy.  Before we discussed it in this class a few weeks ago, I had not thought of a “text” as anything other than words on a page (or a screen). Since this is an entirely new way of viewing texts and literacy for me, I found it helpful to create a table for myself based on some attributes listed by Lankshear and Knobel on p. 21.

New Literacies have more of these qualities	Traditional Literacies have more of these
Participation	Publishing
Distributed expertise	Centralized expertise
Collective intelligence	Individual possessive intelligence
Collaboration	Individual authorship
Dispersion	Scarcity
Sharing	Ownership
Experimentation	Normalization
Innovation and evolution	Stability and fixity
Creative – innovative rule breaking	Generic purity and policing
Relationship	Information broadcast

Technology is advancing at such a rapid rate that a list of examples of new literacies (fanfic, blogs, AMVs, game modding, etc.) will change often. But the above table of characteristics of new literacies should hold true and be a good measuring stick of what qualifies. “The more a literacy practice privileges [Column A over Column B],… the more we should regard it as a ‘new’ literacy” (p. 21).

Gee spends some time discussing Lave & Wenger’s communities of practice, which our group discussed last week. He writes that New Literacy Studies “had little to say about learning as an individual phenomenon. Learning was largely treated…as changing patterns of participation in ‘communities of practice’”(p. 5).  Last week, we decided our APLING678 class probably counts as a community of practice, and I think that even though much of what we write is traditional in the academic sense and in the way we cite references, we also use quite a few new literacies in our discussions (infographics, links to articles, and so on). Much of our class work is focused on participation, collective intelligence, collaboration, sharing, and experimentation (quite a few of the qualities of new literacies listed in the table above). As teachers, if we want our classrooms to become communities of practice and to use new literacies effectively, we have quite a few challenges to consider. I found Black’s research into fan fiction communities encouraging. “Through interaction and negotiation with other fan fiction enthusiasts and readers, the learners were able to use English and a mix of transcultural and translinguistic resources, including knowledge of Asian languages and Japanese manga and anime cultures, to ‘display expertise and build on their different forms of personal, cultural, and linguistic capital’” (Black 2007, p. 119, cited in Reinhardt and Thorne, p. 263). But as Moayeri pointed out, implementing such things can be difficult without a “change in school culture” (p. 34). Teachers may have to advocate for administrative understanding and flexibility. We will also have to figure out how to grade assignments in new literacies and how to make the work load manageable for us as teachers.

References

literate. (1994). In Merriam Webster’s collegiate dictionary (10th ed., p. 680). Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster.