New Media & New Literacies

Week 2- Chapter 1 & 2 Reflection        After I finished reading chapters one and two I found myself going back and re-reading the classroom studies in chapter one with a better grasp of the ways multimodal text can be used in conjunction with new media for the purpose of literacy. The example I liked best was Mr. Cardenas’ class which “employs the pedagogy of play,” (Lankshear et al., 2013, pg. 26) in his New Media Journalism class. Students Play the role of journalists complete with all the necessary props like cameras, notebooks and press passes which give them access to move throughout their school in order to create stories that they deliver in a variety of forms. Students learn how to use different digital software to make meaningful multimodal text be that in the form of a video podcast, or traditional print publication.               One of the techniques used in Mr. Cardenas’ class is teaching ways to compose ...

    "The distinctive contribution of the approach to literacy as social practice lies in the ways in which it involves careful and sensitive attention to what people do with texts, how they make sense of them and use them to further their own purposes in their own learning lives" (Gillen and Barton, 2010, p. 9).      The social approach to understanding literacy, as I am understanding it, focuses on the broader social and cultural aspects of literacy rather than reading as a technical skill. It emphasizes how people use literacy and text in their everyday lives. Our lives are full of what could be called “reading”. Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading? by Motoko Rich makes what I think to be an accurate metaphor when it describes the way some characterize this type of modern literacy consumption as empty calories. The metaphor I immediately thought of was art. Art is all around us but it is only my proficiency with the principles of art and desi...