Tuesday May 17th, 9:00-10:30 – Group 3c

9:00-10:30

Victoria Carrington (in Room 203, upstairs)

Kathy Hibbert
The Salty Chip: A Canadian Multiliteracies Collaborative

Today’s education system faces irrelevance unless we bridge the gap between how students live and how they learn. Multiliteracies teaching and research engages numerous Web 2.0 tools that are changing the ways in which teachers and students interact with learning and demand new strategies for teaching, learning, and research. Challenges faced by educators include how to harness what are often seen as disruptive technologies in powerful ways that reposition students and teachers from consumers to creators of information. I will introduce The Salty Chip: A Canadian Multiliteracies Collaborative, designed to provide teachers and students opportunities to connect, share, collaborate, customize and improve upon multiliteracies applications that demonstrate the use of Web 2.0 tools in educationally meaningful ways.

John Willinsky
The Intellectual Properties of Learning and Literacy

This paper will set out the case to be made for introducing the legal, economic, and historical concept of ‘intellectual property’ into literacy education. The concept will be unpacked in relation to the distinct intellectual properties of learning (which have a special non-commercial and protected status recognized by various legal statutes governing intellectual property over the course of history). It will then be shown the degree to which responsible educators should be concerned to include this concept in the literacy education of students of all ages, as they learning about how the value of literacy is traditionally established and managed, and how that is being transformed by the digital age of the twenty-first century.

James Nahachewksy
Objects of Desire: Changing Textual Ecology in the ELA Classroom

Once stable concepts such as ‘text’ and ‘authorship’ — staples of Secondary English language arts curricula and pedagogy for generations – are being challenged by the pluralities of our digital age. Drawing on Barton and Hamilton’s (2000) use of an ecological metaphor, this paper presentation explores findings from the author’s recent and ongoing classroom-based research into teachers’ and students’ textual responses – their selection, consumption, and production practices – in changing times. Importantly, literacies and learning become a ‘tissue of quotation’s  (Barthes, 1977) in which a complex relationship of literate potentialities and challenges co-exist as teachers and students co-author their classrooms.