{"id":2455,"date":"2009-11-29T23:48:38","date_gmt":"2009-11-30T06:48:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/?p=2455"},"modified":"2009-11-30T00:22:31","modified_gmt":"2009-11-30T07:22:31","slug":"from-one-literacy-to-many-to-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/2009\/11\/29\/from-one-literacy-to-many-to-one\/","title":{"rendered":"From one literacy, to many, to one"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is no question that for\u00a0students in the K-12 system in North America the \u2018new\u2019 literacies afforded by digital technologies play an integral role in their lives.\u00a0 The question is what role\u00a0they should\u00a0play in schools.\u00a0 Most of these students have never known a time without the Internet and have not had to do research when Google (circa 1998<\/a>) and Wikipedia (2001<\/a>) were not options.\u00a0 The question of whether these new tools for finding information and the skills required to use them1<\/sup><\/a><\/a> are literacy is moot for these students.\u00a0 It is a question posed by those attempting to make sense of a rapid change in the learning styles and methods of their students\u2014and in that sense it is necessary and useful.\u00a0 However, any consideration of new literacies as \u2018lesser\u2019 literacies entirely misses the point.\u00a0 The new literacies of what Bolter (2001) repeatedly terms \u201cthe late age of print\u201d are additive in nature.\u00a0 That is, though there is much debate about the relative merits of various forms of representation, the effect is evolutionary and cumulative rather than revolutionary and exclusionary.\u00a0 Many literacies co-exist, supplement one another, extend into one another, and borrow and trade metaphors.\u00a0 As Dobson and Willinsky (2009) note, \u201c\u2026the paradox [is] that while digital literacy constitutes an entirely new medium for reading and writing, it is but a further extension of what writing first made of language\u201d (p. 1).\u00a0 Certainly, for K-12 students, \u2018new\u2019 literacies are not new, they are simply literacy.\u00a0 Thus, multiliteracy, new literacy, digital literacy and information literacy, while useful concepts in the effort to problematize and deconstruct the changes, are all facets of one, evolving and growing literacy. \u00a0Writing in 1996, the year many students currently in the eighth grade were born, the New London Group argued that \u201c\u2026literacy pedagogy now must account for the burgeoning variety of text forms associated with information and multimedia technologies\u201d (p. 2).\u00a0 Whether accounted for or not, those forms and technologies are taken for granted by most students.\u00a0 It seems likely that ignoring this results in a type of cognitive dissonance for students which may make it more difficult for them to learn in classrooms in which print literacy is still the dominant, if not the only, mode.\u00a0 A danger, however, as Dobson and Willinsky (2009) note, is the tendency to assume that \u201c\u2026adolescents\u2019 competence with new technologies\u2014is often inappropriately reconstrued as incompetence with print-based literacies\u201d (p. 11).\u00a0 Some technology enthusiasts, notable among them Marc Prensky, call for a wholesale shift from print to digital literacy.<\/p>\n

\"Marc<\/a>
Marc Prensky speaks in 2008.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Prensky has gone so far as to claim that \u201c…it is very likely that our students\u2019 brains have physically changed\u2014and are different from ours\u2014as a result of how they grew up\u201d (Prensky, 2001, p. 1) and their immersion in digital technologies.\u00a0 While there has been some interesting research in recent years on brain plasticity<\/a>, particularly with reference to interactions with technology, Prensky is justly criticized for going beyond the scientific evidence (McKenzie, 2007).\u00a0 Yet he does highlight important characteristics of the way students now learn and socialize2<\/sup><\/a><\/a> using technology.\u00a0 Similarly, Prensky\u2019s classification of parents and teachers as Digital Immigrants, and their children and students as Digital Natives, though overly simplistic is not entirely unhelpful in conceptualizing the current situation in classrooms.\u00a0 As with other immigrants, some adults have a more difficult time adapting to a new culture than do their children who have been raised in that culture.\u00a0 Of course, the situation is not as black and white as Prensky would have us believe.\u00a0 It is also sometimes true that adults who have made the choice to emigrate, and have done the research and made the sacrifices necessary to act on that choice, are more knowledgeable and participate to a higher degree than do their children who take the advantages and freedoms of the new country for granted.\u00a0 It is normal to find students today who have high<\/p>\n

\"Ubiquitous<\/a>
Ubiquitous texting teenager.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0speed Internet access at home, access to a family desktop computer or a desktop, laptop or netbook computer of their own, a cellular telephone (capable of texting and taking photos and short movies), and an iPod or other MP3 player.\u00a0 In fact, the preceding is almost a list of standard equipment for a teenager in early 21st<\/sup> Century North America.\u00a0 And while it is still true that many schools do not encourage the use of most of these technologies in the classroom, an interesting phenomenon can be observed when teachers make an attempt to do so.\u00a0 The teacher, likely a Digital Immigrant in Prensky\u2019s terms, has made some study of the technology to determine the ways in which it can be most usefully employed in pursuit of particular curricular objectives.\u00a0 What often becomes clear is that many of the Digital Native students, who appear quite facile with technology to the casual observer, are both a.) using only limited aspects of technology primarily for social purposes (MSN, Facebook, Twitter, etc.); and, b.) not fully comprehending the implications of the uses they do make of the technology.\u00a0 This is particularly evident with regard to services such as Facebook where it is not uncommon to find that students rely on default privacy settings, do not read the contract they agree to when opening an account which states that all material posted to the site becomes the property of Facebook, and do not consider the potential long-term consequences of statements or images they post.\u00a0 In short, students are not only taking the technologies and literacies for granted, they have little or no explicit understanding of them. What this argues for is again something that was anticipated by the New London Group thirteen years ago:\u00a0 the need for teachers and students to come together in a learning community to which both parties bring their knowledge, experience, learning styles and literacies.<\/p>\n

To be relevant, learning processes need to recruit, rather than attempt to ignore and erase, the different subjectivities, interests, intentions, commitments, and purposes that students bring to learning.\u00a0 Curriculum now needs to mesh with different subjectivities, and with their attendant languages, discourses and registers, and use these as a resource for learning. (New London Group, 1996, p. 11)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Dobson and Willinsky (2009) hit exactly the right \u201cWhiggish\u201d note in the closing remarks to their draft chapter on digital literacy: \u201cWe must attend to where exactly and by what means digital literacy can be said to be furthering, or impeding, educational and democratic, as well as creative and literary, ends\u201d (Dobson and Willinsky, 2009, p. 22).\u00a0 It is clear that the result of this attention\u00a0must be an expansion of\u00a0the\u00a0definition\u00a0of literacy to include many aspects\u00a0made possible by its\u00a0digital evolution.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Notes<\/p>\n

up<\/a>1<\/sup><\/a> Dobson and Willinsky (2009) point out that literacy in the digital age includes<\/em> the skills, often defined as information literacy, \u201c\u2026 not just for decoding text, but for locating texts and establishing the relationship among them\u201d (p. 19).<\/p>\n

up<\/a>2<\/sup><\/a> \u201cSocial software constitutes a fairly substantial answer to the question of how digital literacy differs from and extends the work of print literacy\u201d (Dobson and Willinsky, 2009, p. 21).<\/p>\n

References<\/p>\n

Bolter, J.D. (2001). Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print<\/em>. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.<\/p>\n

Dobson, T. and Willinsky, J. (2009). Digital Literacy. \u00a0From draft version of a chapter for The Cambridge Handbook on Literacy.<\/em><\/p>\n

McKenzie, J. (2007).\u00a0 Digital Nativism, Digital Delusions, and Digital Deprivation.\u00a0 From Now On<\/em>, 17<\/em>(2).\u00a0 Available: http:\/\/fno.org\/nov07\/nativism.html<\/a><\/p>\n

Prensky, M. (2001).\u00a0 Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants.\u00a0 On the Horizon<\/em>.\u00a0 NCB University Press, 9<\/em>(5).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is no question that for\u00a0students in the K-12 system in North America the \u2018new\u2019 literacies afforded by digital technologies play an integral role in their lives.\u00a0 The question is what role\u00a0they should\u00a0play in schools.\u00a0 Most of these students have never known a time without the Internet and have not had to do research when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1098,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4975],"tags":[6671,1239,6670,6672,5822,6669],"class_list":["post-2455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary-3","tag-digital-immigrant","tag-digital-literacy","tag-digital-native","tag-marc-prensky","tag-multiliteracy","tag-new-literacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1098"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2455"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2455\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2475,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2455\/revisions\/2475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}