Archive for the ‘new literacies’ tag
Technobabble: The Digital Life of Ronosaurus (Writing and Teaching with New Technologies)
Not sure how to begin the story of how I came to be sitting here with my laptop at Cafe Abir (just a moment, let me pick up my triple latte), writing a technoliteracy autobiography, but I will just get started and see what comes out. I can always fix things — make that, revise — later. After all, this changing piece of writing, which is morphing under my fingertips even now, is the climax of the story I wish to tell, the story of how my own composition process has changed because of digital technology and how that should affect the way I teach writing.
“HOT Blogging”: An Article by Lisa Zawilinski
Zawilinski’s article “HOT Blogging: A Framework for Blogging to Promote Higher Order Thinking” gives an excellent overview of the potential benefits of blogs in the classroom for teaching Higher Order Thinking (HOT). She claims that the Internet is this generation’s defining technology for literacy and that this population is both self-guided and in need of guidance. Classroom blogs help bridge the gap between out-of-school literacies and in-school literacies, and most importantly provide an authentic audience for student work. Blogging can help develop online reading comprehension as students are asked to analyze and critically evaluate information, synthesize across multiple texts and communicate with others. She identifies four types of classroom blogs: Classroom News Blog (syllabus, homework assignments, updates), Mirror Blogs (quotes, impressions, reflections, new ideas), Literature Response Blogs (question and response, summary, synthesis), and Showcase Blogs (student works in various media published). Integrating the blog into classwork could include these steps: Bolstering the Background (finding out what students already know, research projects on author and time period, lists of resources), Priming the Pump (first impressions, summaries, confusions clarifies, connections to themselves, other texts or the world), Continuing the Conversation (summarizing and synthesizing across multiple textual units and classroom discussion), and Making Multiplicity Explicit (requiring students to address others’ comments and respond with evidence and clear explanations).
Zawilinski, Lisa. “HOT Blogging: A Framework for Blogging to Promote Higher Order Thinking.” Reading Teacher (not yet published). University of Connecticut. New Literacies Team. Web. 7 March 2010.
Consider Your Audience
Recently a professor told me to consider my audience. She said that my style was far too informal for a grad paper. I needed to consider what writing was appropriate for academic discourse. Academic discourse? Who did she think I was writing to? She was my only reader. I felt, then, that I could play around a little bit with the essay form, experiment a little. I even included a couple of allusions that only she would understand. It did not work. She wanted me, I realized, to speak into an imaginary space where scholars speak, not to each other, but into an imaginary library.
New Literacies: What are They and What Does This Mean for Writing?
What are new literacies? How do new literacies differ from old ones? How does this affect how we write and how we teach writing? To address these questions, I will look at three articles: “‘New’ Literacies: Research and Social Practice” by Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel, “Sampling ‘the New’ in New Literacies” by the same authors from the New Literacies Sampler, and “Looking from the Inside Out: Academic Blogging as New Literacy” by Julia Davies and Guy Merchant, also from the New Literacies Sampler.
