Module 10 New Literacies: Concepts and Practices PDF

MODULE 10 ‘NEW LITERACIES’: CONCEPTS AND PRACTICES Introduction This module spells out what we mean by new literacies and why we think it is worth taking this idea seriously. We focus first on what we mean by ‘literacies’ and then on what we mean by ‘new’. The module also describes some illustrative...

MODULE 10 ‘NEW LITERACIES’: CONCEPTS AND PRACTICES Introduction This module spells out what we mean by new literacies and why we think it is worth taking this idea seriously. We focus first on what we mean by ‘literacies’ and then on what we mean by ‘new’. The module also describes some illustrative examples of practices we count as new literacies and maps them in relation to one another. The 21st century learning skills adhere to the building and enhancing new literacies across the curriculum. As a product of improvement and changes in education, new literacies emerge and directs the educational sector in order for the learning process to cope up with the demands of the changing courses of time. Students must learn these new concepts and practices of the new literacies. Lesson 1. Conceptualizing Literacies (Lankshear Knobel, 2006) We define 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)’. As with any definition of a phenomenon whose scope is large and complex, there are a number of key concepts here that need spelling out in more detail (Lankshear Knobel, 2006). ‘Recognized ways’ What we mean by ‘recognized ways’ can be understood in relation to the concept of ‘practice’ as it is widely used with reference to literacy. Scribner and Cole (1981) introduced a technical concept of ‘practice’ to literacy theory based on their research into the relationship between literacy and cognition. This research was undertaken at a time when it was common to think of literacy as a ‘tool’ or ‘technology’ – a writing system – that produces valuable outcomes when people apply it. Against this view, Scribner and Cole conceptualized literacy as practice. They define ‘practice’ in a series of statements. A practice is: [A] recurrent, goal-directed sequence of activities using a particular technology and a particular system of knowledge... [It] always refers to socially developed and patterned ways of using technology and knowledge to accomplish tasks... [T]asks that humans engage in constitute a social practice when they are directed to socially recognized goals and make use of a shared technology and knowledge system. Lesson 2. The ‘New’: in Theory and in Practices (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006) We spoke of literacies that can be regarded as ‘new’ in an ontological sense of being is made of new kind of ‘stuff’. We distinguished between new technical ‘stuff’ and new ethos ‘stuff’. At the heart of the idea of new technical stuff is digitally: the growth and ongoing development of digital-electronic technologies and the use of programming languages, source code and binary code for writing programs and storing and retrieving data. At the heart of the idea of new ethos stuff is the emergence of a distinctly contemporary mindset, discussed at length. In this section we will elaborate briefly on these ideas by focusing on some especially salient aspects of ‘new technical stuff’ and providing concrete exemplifications of ‘new ethos stuff’ (Lankshear Knobel, 2006). ‘New technical stuff’ Much of what is important for literacy about the ‘new technical stuff’ is encapsulated in Mary Kalantzis’ idea that ‘You click for ‘‘A’’ and you click for ‘‘red’’’ (Cope et al. 2005: 200). Basically, programmers write source code that is stored as binary code (combinations of 0s and 1s) and drives different kinds of applications (for text, sound, image, animation, communications functions, etc.) on digital-electronic apparatuses (computers, games hardware, CD and MP3 players, etc.). Someone with access to a fairly standard computer and internet connection, and who has fairly elementary knowledge of standard software applications can create a diverse range of meaningful artIfacts using a strictly finite set of physical operations or techniques (keying, clicking, cropping, dragging), in a tiny space, with just one or two (albeit complex) ‘tools’. They can, for example, create a multimodal text and send it to a person, a group, or an entire internet community in next to no time and at next to no cost. The text could be a photoshop image posted to Flickr.com. It could be an animated Valentine’s Day card sent to an intimate friend. It could be a short animated film sequence using toys and objects found at home, complete with an original music soundtrack, attached to a blog post. It could be a slide presentation of images of some event with narrated commentary, or remixed clips from a video game that spoof some aspect of popular culture or that retell some obscure literary work in cartoon animations (Lankshear Knobel, 2006). The shift from material inscriptions to digital coding, from analogue to digital representations, has unleashed conditions and possibilities that are massively ‘new’. In the case of the shift from print to the post-typographic, Bill Cope (Cope et al. 2005) describes what this means for the visual rendering of texts. He explains that digital technologies reduce the basic unit of composition from the level of a character to a point below character level. In the case of a text on a screen the unit of composition is reduced to pixels. This has an important implication. It means that text and images can be rendered together seamlessly and relatively easily on the same page and, moreover, that text can be layered into images – both static and moving – (and vice versa) in ways that were very difficult – and in some respects impossible – to do physically with the resources of print. Literacies is socially recognized as 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)’. This paradigmatic sense of ‘new’ in relation to literacy is not concerned with new literacies as such but rather with a new approach to thinking about literacy as a social phenomenon. Literacies that can be regarded as ‘new’ in an ontological sense of being made of new kind of ‘stuff’. We distinguished between new technical ‘stuff’ and new ethos ‘stuff’