"the multiliteracies approach helps students learn to be savvier users and organizers of online resources, use technologies to facilitate revision and collaboration throughout the writing process, and use technologies to achieve authentic goals and reach real audiences for their research."
(Borsheim, Merritt, & Reed, 2008, p. 88)
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In looking at how technology assists students’ literacy learning, it is important to first look at the multimodality of the internet, and the variety of ways people use the different modes online concurrently to interact with different communities of practice.
The study of multimodality (Street, Pahl, & Rowsell, 2010) shows how multimodal texts use more than one semiotic mode for people to interact within communicative practices. Students needs to be literate in multiple ways to navigate through the visual, textual, and technological information of the 21st century in order to be able to fully understand each multimodal text, provided to us by technology. Luke (2000) suggests that “In hypertext navigations, reading, writing, and communicating are not linear or unimodal, but demand a multimodal reading of laterally connected multi-embedded and further hotlinked information resources variously coded in animation, symbols, print text, photos, movie clips, or three dimensional and manoeuvrable graphics.” (p. 73). These ‘new literacies’ are based on a variety of text-symbol relationships, and have a language that accompanies them. Some of these ‘languages’ are simple and used in a variety of online communities, such as keyboard generated emoticons or smileys, while others have an individual language for just one type of community. For example, Twitter, (a social networking website that allows its members to post short 140 character messages and links to photos of videos) uses language like ‘tweets’, ‘hashtags’, ‘trending’ etc., specific to its community. For those who are not members of this community, this language or metalanguage, is likely foreign. Gee (2009) argues that “All language is meaningful only in and through the contexts in which it is used…All language is ‘inexplicit’ until listeners and readers fill it out on the basis of the experiences they have had and the information they have gained in prior socioculturally significant interactions with others.” (p. 31). Teachers need to provide students with opportunities to engage with technology, in order to develop the metalanguages associated with them. We not only need to instruct students how to use hardware, but also online tools, applications, and internet navigation that work alongside the physical technology. Digital tools and technology, are assisting students by providing them with more shared, social, literacy opportunities than ever before. Gee (2009) further develops this idea in his discussion that literacy is learned based on situated practices. He (Gee, 2009) suggests that “situated meanings make specialist language lucid, easy and useful.” (p. 31) and that digital mediums “can be used to support learning and literacy. The key to all of them is that they situate meaning in words of experience –the stuff out of which the human mind is made –experience that is ultimately shared, collaborative, social and cultural” (p. 32). |
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