The readings this week have had as a common theme the changing nature of what we mean by literacy and particularly how this should be addressed by educators. A central concern of the New London Group has been how the confluence of media offering a wide spectrum of multimodal representation has driven cultural globalization; specifically, the group has been concerned with how disparities in literacy, defined broadly, have impacted educational, social and economic outcomes. The New London Group program is not just descriptive; it is also prescriptive. Taking the above phenomenon as given, they endorse a pedagogy that prepares students for a future where skillfully orchestrating and integrating diverse symbol systems to create meaning will be the hallmark of new literacy or multiliteracy. As a radical extension to and remediation of earlier modes and media, it is helpful to think of multiliteracy as a form of social practice rather than as a specific skill set. (Dobson and Willinsky, 2009)

Multiliteracy, into which digital literacy can be subsumed, entails the ability to identify relevant content and recombine it in meaningful ways, using the appropriate semiotic mode(s) as the cultural purpose and context of the communication change. It places greater demands on the literate requiring proficiency with technological tools and knowledge resources as well as in critical thinking. The ability to understand the logical connection between ideas and to assess supporting evidence is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the latter. Also needed, will be an understanding of the socio-cultural constraints that communicating partners operate within and an awareness of the larger societal circumstances, which will include but will not be limited to, the unique challenges of racialized or otherwise marginalized communities. An inclusive cultural pluralism will need to be part of the social practice of effective multiliteracy. (New London Group, 1996)

Discrete symbol systems, or semiotic domains, can be seen as rule-governed design spaces and a multiliteracy involves familiarity if not fluency in their appropriate orders of discourse. (New London Group, 1996) Competent multiliteracy assumes an ability to move confidently among semiotic design spaces. A mark of full participation in a design space should be measured not only by the extent to which participants understand the rules but also in their ability to create new rules through a meta-level understanding of their purpose. Consequently, a change in the purpose of a communication may require a redesign of the modes and media of its transmission. (Dobson and Willinsky, 2009)

In the first version of this activity, I focused on the functional significance of the contents of the bag with only a tangential interest in how this might affect their owner. I identified the role of the items as tools through which globalized concepts of personhood, citizenship and employment are reified and the items are exemplars in this sense. I did this through conventional text and two photos as this seemed an apt manner in which to convey the idea. The contents of the bag were displayed in a neat grid pattern in a static photo and overall conveyed the impression of institutional and official order. A sensitive observer would have seen how the intertextuality of these testing tools carried the institutional memory of a system that sought to assimilate newcomers into the service of a dominant culture and language (Bayne & Ross, 2007) In the first assignment, no attempt was made at a critical framing of the items and no attempt to indicate what the emotional and personal significance of the items might be to me. Indeed, to do so would have been inappropriate to the purpose of the communication.

My purpose in this assignment was to describe my personal feelings and attitudes towards the items I work with when examining. I thought a more suitable way to deliver this communication would be through an impromptu video in which I pull the items out at random and talk in an unscripted way about how I feel towards them. However, form does not simply follow function; the affordances and limitations of a form expand but also foreclose new possibilities. I experienced this when I discovered that the UBC blog only permits an upload size of 20 MB (!?) for video which necessitated a mad scramble to reduce the size of the file before the deadline. After several frustrating experiments with , I finally was able to do this with Handbrake but the quality of the final product was compromised.

References

1. The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review 66(1). 60-92
2. Dobson, T & Willinsky, J., (2009) Digital Literacy, Chapter 16, The Cambridge Handbook of Literacy, Cambridge University Press
3. Bayne, Sian and Ross, J., (2007) The ‘digital native’ and ‘digital immigrant’: a dangerous opposition paper is presented at the Annual Conference of the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE) December 2007.