Beyond ‘new’ literacies

Hi all!

I just found out about this through a listserv I subscribe to, and it looks like there are some interesting articles in this special themed issue: Beyond ‘new’ literacies, edited by Dana J. Wilber, and published by Digital Culture & Education, an interdisciplinary, web-published, open-access journal, which looks really cool and worth checking out. Some of the articles talk about constructivist pedagogies, visual literacies, definitions of literacies, etc….

These are a Few Of My Favorite Posts (Part 1)

What stood out from this week’s reading was the idea of asking students to write about their favorite posts or posters on the class blog. Rather than allowing to vanish over time, the assignment forces students to look back over the work the class has produced. Such an exercise has two important functions: it reviews the material, develops critical skills and encourages the social production of knowledge.

I would recommend a variation that would add another important skill, synthesis: students could review the blogs from the course and pull out ideas that seem most significant. Since my final project is an overview of the salient points of the course, along with some of my own new ideas, I thought I would mine your posts for the most relevant concepts for my own purposes (teaching face-to-face, text-based classes with online support), which I would then possibly include in my final paper. Such recycling of material fits in with my developing idea that teachers should encourage students to use the smaller pieces of writing, both their own and that of others in the class, to create a larger whole in an integrated and continuous process.

Twitter Literacy – Howard Rheingold

I found this article by Howard Rheingold very helpful for navigating the world of tweets… He argues for the importance of new kinds of media literacies and says that “the difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it – on knowing how to look at it.” Ultimately,

“Whatever you call this blend of craft and community, one of the most important challenges posed by the real-time, ubiquitous, wireless, always-on, often alienating interwebs are the skills required for the use of media to be productive and to foster authentic interpersonal connection, rather than waste of time and attention on phony, banal, alienated pseudo-communication. Know-how is where the difference lies.”

Read Rheingold’s article here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/rheingold/detail?entry_id=39948#ixzz0kx2bMXjy

Don’t panic, but the future of human existence depends on what you choose to teach in your Composition course.

I couldn’t quite tell if I was sensing a tone of excitement or panic in this week’s texts.

While I think both Miller and Yancey (CCC 56:2) make excellent arguments for rethinking and possibly expanding our practices (we already inhabit a world heavily influenced by screen literacy), and I couldn’t agree more when both Wysocki (Writing New Media) and Yancey suggest that the writing we ask students to do in school is not connected enough to their lives, I’m still not convinced that this justifies changing the purpose of a first year writing course from “writing/composing” (as Hesse argues in CCC 61:3) to “rhetoric/composing” (as Selfe does, also CCC 61:3).

I do think we should teach composition in a broader context, integrating visual arguments and the rhetoric of new media composition, but I think this has to be a different course than what is usually conceived of as first year comp. Might a certain large, urban state university in northern California change the focus of its second year composition course, currently emphasizing writing about literature, to multimodal composition? I, for one, would love to teach a such a course, but I would want students in it to have a good handle on written composition (and here’s maybe where we need to expand beyond the singular focus on the academic essay, considering that the world we inhabit includes written composition in many forms, some of them digital), so that writing can be one of many possible modes of communication for our students.

So, while I hear the new media alarm, it’s competing with others that have been going off for some time—in particular, the one screaming about the need for colleges to equip students with basic writing skills.

Why Composition (and Digital Media)?

Alex Reid, author of The Two Virtuals (a chapter of which we discussed in class a couple of weeks ago), has a recent post on his blog about “what composition is for and why digital media is integral to it.” This post seemed to speak directly to some issues that our class has been circling around now for a few weeks: namely, what is the point of introducing digital media into a composition course?

Reid’s answer? We do it to leverage the writing (some) students are already doing:

What we can know with a higher degree of certainty is that [students] will write for online spaces. Of course this writing is often very, very short and highly informal. But it is the one writing practice they actually elect to pursue. My suggestion is that by incorporating digital composition into FYC we can make connections between their current elective writing practices and other writing practices that they might choose to adopt.

Perhaps the line between what students “elect to pursue” and school writing isn’t so easy to draw, but I thought that distinction resonated with the themes of motivation, discipline, and (dare I say it?) desire that came up in our latest class discussion. Some of us seemed to feel that moving toward new literacies in FYC is an important end in itself (as Cynthia Selfe argues in Writing New Media), while others seemed to agree with Mark Bauerlein that doing so (or doing too much of it) might lead to a loss of “slow, linear thinking.”

What I see Reid suggesting is that it doesn’t have to be one or the other. New literacies and “old” literacies aren’t (necessarily) mutually exclusive, any more than learning another language reduces your ability to speak your native tongue. Perhaps increased attention to — and practice of – any literate practices can have positive and lasting effects. The challenge composition instructors face, though, is helping students negotiate the sometimes murky waters between what Lankshear and Knobel present as two different “mindsets.”

Ethanol, Swine Flu and The New Literacies

Our culture has taught us to be inherently skeptical. Whether it has been killer bees, the electric car, Avian Flu, H1N1 or the promises of ethanol, we are trained that big issues come and go. We watch things cycle in and out of public consciousness (what is the top news story for several weeks straight might not get even a mention in a month’s time) and are trained to jump on the bandwagon of what promises to be the next big thing only to find out later that the hype was nothing more than misplaced optimism and over-speculation as to the future trajectory of whatever phenomenon we were chasing. How is hype over New Literacies be any different? Particularly when placed in direct comparison (or even opposition to) the conventional written essay? If our culture has taught us anything it should be that we should step into the “new” cautiously. You would think that part of our identity as Americans would be that of savvy hype critics. Instead it seems, as Buckingham Points out in Introducing Identity, that what we consider to be advancements in our culture “are contributing to a sense of fragmentation and uncertainty, in which the traditional resources for identity formation are no longer straightforward or so easily available.” In a sense we are becoming fence-sitters and fickle as who we are depends on the context of where we are – whether it is in a face to face social environment or “hanging out” on facebook. This fragmentation, it seems, is taking away from our ability to see things clearly. If we jump on the New Literacy bandwagon and completely refocus composition classrooms in favor of teaching visual compositions might that, decades from now, seem as quaint and ridiculous as Hall’s 1906 suggestion of a cold bath as a remedy for being horny?

Memes and New Literacy Education

While reading about memes in the context of “cultural production” I realized I first needed to wrap my head around what actually constitutes a proper meme.  I had only encountered the word once before when a friend sent me a link to a YouTube video called “The Google Verb Meme Thing” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcKk_HK-FP4).  She sent the link with a message that said, “You will love this, it totally made me think of you” but, while I was watching, I couldn’t understand what I was watching and why.  I didn’t know what a meme was, let alone what The Google Verb Meme Thing was, and by the end of the one minute and forty-seven second video I felt as though I must be a complete cultural illiterate.  After reading chapter 9 in the New Literacies Sampler, “Online Memes, Affinities, and Cultural Production,” I feel a little bit better.  In the formal discourse of memetics, The Google Verb Meme Thing is nothing more than a mildly infectious phenomenon, as it doesn’t meet the criteria necessary to be classified as a bona-fide meme.

Knobel and Lankshear view memes as “recognizable, bounded phenomena that have material effects in the world and that can be scrutinized.”  Examples of memes, outside of web-spread instances of pop-cultural reference are things such as viral marketing campaigns, fashion trends, catch-phrases, specific production methodology, universally recognizable melodies, etc.  Richard Dawkins (1976) suggested that a meme, in order to be successful needed to meet three basic criteria: fidelity (the characteristics of the meme allow it to be passed along more or less in its original form), fecundity (how widely and quickly spread a meme may be) and longevity (self-explanitory)  Knoble and Lankshear point out that it is more important for a meme to be memorable than it is for it to be important or useful.  How then can a simple, and seemingly unimportant cultural phenomenon benefit literacy education?

Knoble and Lankshear use Freire and Street’s definition of Literacy, with a “big L” as “making meaning in ways that are tied directly to life and to being in the world.”  Memes, as cultural commentary, social activism, and even as a overstated and humorous celebration of the mundanity of daily life, tie very much into the social, meaning-making aspects of New Literacy.

Teaching students to identify and analyze online memes engages them in critical thinking skills that will allow them to identify phenomena that are influencing not only our culture and the world, but also the memes that are pervasive in their own minds.  Equipped with both a micro and macro capacity for recognizing and understanding the function of memes, students may have a better understanding of how small actions can translate into great ones.

Video Games as an Enabler of New Literacies?

I’ve been contemplating for a while about what to write in this blog post, because I’ve been faced with a bit of a problem: in the article that I read for this week, James Paul Gee’s “Pleasure, Learning, Video Games, and Life: The Projective Stance“, Gee doesn’t seem to be talking about literacy at all, and Certainly not literacy as defined by Lankshear and Knobel in their plenary address. Their revised definition in “Sampling ‘the New’ in New Literacies” fits a bit better, but literacies as “socially recognized ways of generating, communicating, and negotiating meaningful content through the medium of encoded texts within contexts of participation in Discourses (or, as members of Discourses)” seems so nebulous and hedged as to include almost anything within its purview (4). Even working from that definition (which uses Gee’s own research in discourse theory), I have trouble finding anything that remotely relates to what I would normally think of as literacy in Gee’s chapter. The closest he gets is discussing the sporadic text that happens in between all the action in video games. That isn’t literacy, that is just playing around, right?

Academic Blogging as New Literacy (ch.8)

In this time of multimodal, digital texts and new literacies, I am still a pencil and paper person and find that taking notes the “old-fashioned way” allows me to better integrate with the text as the arguments and ideas are re-represented into the dialogue I have personally created with the text. That being said, as I read chapter 8 “Academic Blogging as New Literacy” and began to take notes I thought it might be helpful (or more appropriate) to include my notes here in the blog forum so that maybe some deeper connection could be made between the work that we do privately and the work that we do publicly as discussed in this chapter.

• blogging, as discussed in this ch., is a social practice capable of creating and changing/manipulating relationships while allowing its participants  to create/form/and integrate new ways of knowing and learning information.
• blogs are interactive texts in which the creator beings a digital text and the audience/participants continue or comment in an ongoing reciprocating process
• blogging allows for possibilities that cannot be afforded through regular paper-based texts. The use of links, hyperlinks, video, and music components make information sharing both endless and limit-less.
• Blogs in their origination are a blend of the personal and a public or more accurately personal writing for the public.
• The creators of blog posts typically write for an immediate audience and sometimes find difficulty once they discover a larger readership than first imagined (ex. teen girls writing for friends who become aware that the entire school district and beyond can view the information).
• Academic blogging can be an extension of a person’s scholarly persona and afford them a place to explore ideas and concepts related/connected to the work they are pursing in their studies
• blogging takes more than just the actual text into consideration to meaning, readers must also be aware of page layouts, pictures, colors and even advertisements. The “situatedness” of the text becomes extremely important
• digital texts pose a problem in the discussion of contexts because of the varying approaches and choices that can be made from a single posting. Not everyone will follow all the available links, read the archives or respond in the same way to these complex configurations of texts.
• There are multiple lens through which these digital-based texts can be researched, one example being “insider research” which is done by the same people who are using/interacting with the new media technologies.
• These new digital texts need to be investigated for the way in which they create social events and relationships among broad social boundaries and how these relationships affect their audience/participants
• Nixon (2003), as cited in the text, points out that we need more focus on how we research as well as what we research.

At this point in the text the authors begin to discuss their own research in which they practice “insider research” by posting to their own blogs, commenting, and participating in the online world of digital texts (including images as noted by Flickr.com) all while tracking their own activity using a web program designed as a note taking tool (another “blog” form?). They discuss their findings in relation to the following three categories which are best summarized through the authors own accounts (for more information review Ch.8):

1. Publishing the Self which includes specific issues about performing online

identities, our sensitivities as bloggers to impression formation and our deci-

sions about what to post and what not to post. In considering the content

of our blogs, we look at how postings can work on the boundaries between

private and public life. We also include the affective dimension of blogging

in this category (such as feelings of pride, embarrassment and so on) and

their relationship to respect and reputation in blogging communities.

2. The nature and fabric of the text as an interlinked and constantly evolving

work, that is fluid, visual and ,at least in part, created by readers, other blog-

gers and the comments that are added. The fabric of the text is concerned

with the tools used to construct meaning. Predominantly this is about the

use of multimodal text to signify group membership, reference to shared

understandings and humor. However, we are also keen to show how the

visual mode is used and, particularly focus on the use of photographic

images. This section talks about the way in which medium, modality and

semantics connect.

3. Social networks looks at how interactivity gives rise to the notion of blog-

ging as a shared endeavor, a network than can lead to the development

of a community of practice or an affinity space and how this relates to other

platforms for online interaction (email, Flickr, MSN, shared blogs, others’

blogs) as well as to offline interaction.

All of this information allows us to see the multitude of opportunities afforded to us through digital-based texts, as the authors point out it is a way for the individual to “author the self”. Developing and sustaining an online identity is a chance for virtually anyone to explore the possibilities of a completely new global medium. This medium warrants a significant amount of attention for the many (if not unlimited) possibilities this has to offer academia and at this point the research is merely a beginning.

New Literacies: What are They and What Does This Mean for Writing?

What are new literacies? How do new literacies differ from old ones? How does this affect how we write and how we teach writing? To address these questions, I will examine three articles: “‘New’ Literacies: Research and Social Practice” by Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel, “Sampling ‘the New’ in New Literacies” by the same authors from the New Literacies Sampler, and “Looking from the Inside Out: Academic Blogging as New Literacy” by Julia Davies and Guy Merchant, also from the New Literacies Sampler.

First of all, there has been a massive proliferation of kinds of texts and textual spaces. Usually the term “new literacy” is associated with recent computing and communications technology; however, new literacy is not limited to new technology. Technological forms of new literacy, as listed by Lankshear and Knobel, include: blogs, webpages, synchronous forms of communication (chat and instant messaging), asynchronous forms (email and discussion boards), and digital multimedia forms. Other types of new literacy are: zines, fan fiction, critical literacy, memes, scenario planning (business applications, for example), and adbusting. It is important for writing teachers to acknowledge the fact that students are reading more and producing more writing, in different styles, tones, and registers and for a wider range of purposes, than ever before. Rather than dismissing texting or fanfiction as inapplicable to academic writing, teachers should show students how to translate skills they already have, for example narrative and persuasive abilities (what I did today and why we should go see this movie), into a different kind of writing. However, writing itself is changing in response to new literacies.