Multiliteracies in ELA Classrooms

Blog Post 1 – Sarra McMillan

This article talks about Web 2.0 – more specifically, blogging – and the “deeply participatory” (2) nature of blogs. As 21st century educators, participation must be a key element within learning in our classrooms and, therefore, blogging can be a great tool. Blogging participation comes from the conversation that occurs through the post and comments, between the original author and readers.

Lankshear and Knobel introduce Blood’s definition of a blog; a blog is “a website that is up-dated frequently, with new material posted at the top of the page” (2). They also state that the majority of blogs “are now hybrids of journal entries and annotations or indices of links, or some mix of reflections, musings, anecdotes and the like with embedded hyperlinks to related websites” (3).

It is interesting to consider that this paper was presented to the American Educational Research Association in 2006; in the past 7 years, the process of blogging has evolved. For example, Tumblr was founded in 2007 and now hosts 121.3 million blogs (Tumblr). There are numerous free services available to host various types of blogs: Twitter, Weebly, WordPress, Blogger, Posterous, Pinterest, Instagram… And, often, our students are more informed and involved in the process of blogging participation.

Folksonomies, according to Isabella Peters, “consist of of freely selectable keywords, or tags, which can be liberally attached to any information resource – hence the term ‘tag’, which might be defined as either an identifying label, or the mark hung around a dog’s throat signifying ownership” (153). It is the tagging of information, as in “hashtagging” photos posted on Instagram or organizing boards by topic on Pinterest.

I found an interesting article written by Élise Lavoué titled “Social Tagging to Enhance Collaborative Learning.” Near the beginning of the paper, the framework presented by Kimmerle, Cress, and Held, which introduces 4 processes for using tagging in education is explained:

“Externalization: learners externalize their knowledge on a resource by assigning tags to it. To create tags, users have to articulate their own cognitive concepts and to translate them into keywords. This cognitive effort can arouse an individual learning.

Internalization: by navigating in the information space using the tag clouds, users collect information relating to a tag. On the one hand, they learn tags used by others and as a consequence how the others classify their resources. On the other hand, tags show new interconnections between concepts for users. If can lead to the incorporation of the concepts of the community and to the modification of the individual cognitive structures of users.

Assimilation: by discovering and using new tags (and the associated concepts) that are in agreement with their knowledge, users can widen their knowledge but do not develop new different concepts.

Accommodation: users can question and modify their cognitive concepts by learning that their associations on a specific domain are rather different, inadequate, or even false. It can occur when users realize that the other users use tags that are very different from theirs, what implies that specific resources or tags are bound to very different concepts.” (2)

In the end, I wonder if English Language Arts teachers are responsible for teaching students to tag appropriately, to organize information accurately? Who decides what is appropriate and accurate?  I will use Web 2.0 and social media within my classroom, as a way to encourage participation and discussion.

Seminar – Sarra, Lisa, and Fatima

Summary – Check Lisa’s blog post here!

Social Media TED talk available here!

Activity

In small groups, read the poem What Do I Remember of the Evacuation and think of at least 5 tags (ex. Canadian( to help organize this poem among other literature. Discuss tags afterwards.

Questions

1. How have you or how would you use social media, blogs and/or tagging/folksonomies within your classroom? What are some of the implications of using these platforms/tools?
2. What are some of the dangers of using social media in the classroom? How can we, as educators, address these concerns?
3. Some argue that students lose valuable face-to-face interaction when we utilize tools like blogs to have conversations in the classroom. Do you agree or disagree?

Link to Prezi

Sources

Lankshear, C. & Knobel, M.  Blogging as Participation: The Active Sociality of a New Literacy. American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, US, April 11, 2006. Web.

Élise Lavoué. Social Tagging To Enhance Collaborative Learning. Université de Lyon,  CNRS. Web.

Peters, Isabella, and Paul Becker. Folksonomies: Indexing and Retrieval in Web 2.0. Berlin: De Gruyter/Saur, 2009. Print.

“Tumblr.” About. N.p., n.d. Web. (http://www.tumblr.com/about).