English

This paper examines the changing landscape of literacy teaching and learning, revisiting the case for a “pedagogy of multiliteracies” first put by the New London Group in 1996. It describes the dramatically changing social and technological contexts of communication and learning, develops a language with which to talk about representation and communication in educational contexts, and addresses the question of what constitutes appropriate literacy pedagogy for our times.

What is the book in a digital age? Is it a physical object containing pages encased in covers? Is it a portable device that gives us access to entire libraries? The codex, the book as bound paper sheets, emerged around 150 CE. It was preceded by clay tablets and papyrus scrolls. Are those books? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Amaranth Borsuk considers the history of the book, the future of the book, and the idea of the book. Tracing the interrelationship of form and content in the book's development, she bridges book history, book arts, and electronic literature to expand our definition of an object we thought we knew intimately.

Contrary to the many reports of its death (which has been blamed at various times on newspapers, television, and e-readers), the book is alive. Despite nostalgic paeans to the codex and its printed pages, Borsuk reminds us, the term “book” commonly refers to both medium and content. And the medium has proved to be malleable. Rather than pinning our notion of the book to a single form, Borsuk argues, we should remember its long history of transformation. Considering the book as object, content, idea, and interface, she shows that the physical form of the book has always been the site of experimentation and play. Rather than creating a false dichotomy between print and digital media, we should appreciate their continuities.

In the second edition of their influential book New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Classroom Learning, Lankshear and Knobel argued that engagement with these practices was “largely confined to learners’ lives in spaces outside of schools.” That was nearly 10 years ago, and in some respects, very little has changed. In many classrooms, there is a lot more technology than there was back then; for instance, the provision of interactive whiteboards, desktops, laptops, and portable devices is better, and there is a greater variety of software and hardware on offer. Yet, even when equipment is available, up to date, and in good working order, problems of curricular integration still arise. Despite all the rhetoric about the importance of new or digital literacies in education, recent curricular reforms and their associated assessment regimes have tended to privilege traditional literacy skills and printed text. An expansive view of new literacies in practice seems hard to realize. Why should this be the case?

The school curriculum is not neutral knowledge. Rather, what counts as legitimate knowledge is the result of complex power relations, struggles, and compromises among identifiable class, race, gender, and religious groups. A good deal of conceptual and empirical progress has been made in the last 2 decades in answering the question of whose knowledge becomes socially legitimate in schools. Yet, little attention has actually been paid to that one arti-fact that plays such a major role in defining whose culture is taught–the textbook. In this article, I discuss ways of approaching texts as embodiments of a larger process of cultural politics. Analyses of them must focus on the complex power relationships involved in their production, contexts, use, and reading. I caution us against employing overly reductive kinds of perspectives and point to the importance of newer forms of textual analysis that stress the politics of how students actually create meanings around texts. Finally, I point to some of the implications of all this for our discussions of curriculum policy.

This paper examines the history of the learning theory "constructionism" and its most well-known implementation, Logo, to examine beliefs involving both "C's" in CSCW: computers and cooperation. Tracing the tumultuous history of one of the first examples of computer-supported cooperative learning (CSCL) allows us to question some present-day assumptions regarding the universal appeal of learning to program computers that undergirds popular CSCL initiatives today, including the Scratch programming environment and the "FabLab" makerspace movement. Furthermore, teasing out the individualistic and anti-authority threads in this project and its links to present day narratives of technology development exposes the deeply atomized and even oppositional notions of collaboration in these projects and others under the auspices of CSCW today that draw on early notions of 'hacker culture.' These notions tend to favor a limited view of work, learning, and practice-an invisible constraint that continues to inform how we build and evaluate CSCW technologies.

Phew! What a journey betwixt East and West that was, the mere description of the process of the process-poem. What [Jonathan Stalling] allows to subtly unfold in these poems are two popular visions of China dreamt up by the West (and it would hardly be controversial to say that the Westerner's dream of China has woven itself thick into the fabric of Chinese reality). The beginning of each poem - here, "Please speak a little louder. I can't hear you" - evokes the businessperson's China, the tourist's phrasebook in which language is a tool, the straightforward economy of exchange in which nothing is lost in the gulf between languages - because nothing has really been said. The end of each poem sounds like a garbled version of appropriated ancient Chinese wisdom and culture: the ending verse, which begins with "persuading guests to drink wine / one silk thread at a time" sounds, to my half-trained ears, like a parodie condensation of the great poet Li Bai mixed into the I Ching with a dash of Confucius to finish. I love that these poems receive their movement from the contingencies of language itself - passing sometimes across the smooth surfaces of sense, other times along the striated channels of sound - to get from language as utility (sensibility) to language as poetry (senselessness). Certainly these poems function as a gentle critique of Orientalism and are a testament to the infinite pliability of language. But the contingencies that are the poems' internal connective tissue produce accidental beauty along the way: the double, parallel descent of the shape of the poem, for one; and lovely lines like "rest on a mourning shrine / sins dark / veiled, narrow pass" all the more gorgeous for having travelled through the tumultuous waters of translation.

There is so much more I want to write about yet there's so little room, but shout-outs to: Laura Solórzano's post-Steinian gem of a poem (p. 189); Bela Shaycvich's hilarious drunken correspondences on the tasks of the translator (p. 56-57); Desmond Kon ZhîchengMingdé's masterly sestina (p. 193). By way of a cautious conclusion: The Animated Reader is a worthwhile thing; it serves as a whirlwind intro to some stellar and inventive writers; it's mostly a fuckin' blast to read because it hitssomanydifferentkindsofpleasurenodcs; and it reminds you how potent the poetic form is, and that poetry will not be slain by new Internet for ms, but will forge a head, procreating gloriously with them.

Much of Nigerian oral poetry, especially the musical genre, has been increasingly reduced to digital formats through the instrumentality of new media technologies. This transformation has, however, not been sufficiently acknowledged in oral literary researches and discourses. This alternative existence acquired by the oral forms manifests itself in digital technological modes like CDs, VCDs, DVDs, digital radio and television and the internet which assure them of longevity. This paper, therefore, engages Nigerian oral poetry and its inscription in digital processes using new media technologies. In particular, it negotiates the trajectory of transforming primary orality to secondary and tertiary orality through which oral performances like songs have acquired new modes of existence and meanings by way of recordings and digitalization using the new media. Many of these poetic forms have travelled through historical time to the postmodern moment as migrant metaphors and have become stored in digital forms thus making them new wine though preserved in the old wineskins of the poets and new media processes. Using an emergent generation of Nigerian popular poets and musical artistes, the paper problematizes the episteme of authorship. It interrogates the very idea of authorship in the contested and interstitial space of communal and individual authorship in the digital age where the term has undergone radical destabilisation. Who owns the oral forms, for instance? Is it the so-called anonymous composer in traditional society, the collector or recorder who mediates the creative process and becomes a surrogate agent, or the contemporary artist who is heir to this timeless tradition of oral intellection through performances that are digitalized and stored in retrieval systems, or is it a virtual community of authors, or a hybrid of all of these? The paper concludes that digital technologies are a means of preserving these oral forms and endowing them with vitality and enduring relevance to meet the immediacy and urgency of postmodern societal needs in Nigeria.

2020 marks the 25th anniversary of the “digital divide.” Although a quarter century has passed, legacy digital inequalities continue, and emergent digital inequalities are proliferating. Many of the initial schisms identified in 1995 are still relevant today. Twenty-five years later, foundational access inequalities continue to separate the digital haves and the digital have-nots within and across countries. In addition, even ubiquitous-access populations are riven with skill inequalities and differentiated usage. Indeed, legacy digital inequalities persist vis-à-vis economic class, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, aging, disability, healthcare, education, rural residency, networks, and global geographies. At the same time, emergent forms of inequality now appear alongside legacy inequalities such that notions of digital inequalities must be continually expanded to become more nuanced. We capture the increasingly complex and interrelated nature of digital inequalities by introducing the concept of the “digital inequality stack.” The concept of the digital inequality stack encompasses access to connectivity networks, devices, and software, as well as collective access to network infrastructure. Other layers of the digital inequality stack include differentiated use and consumption, literacies and skills, production and programming, etc. When inequality exists at foundational layers of the digital inequality stack, this often translates into inequalities at higher levels. As we show across these many thematic foci, layers in the digital inequality stack may move in tandem with one another such that all layers of the digital inequality stack reinforce disadvantage.