new media literacy

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.

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?

Alan Bigelow tells in this interview how he started publishing online works of digital poetry around the year 1999 and where his inspirations for his work come from. Furthermore he explains why he chose to change from working with Flash to working with HTML5 and in which way this decision subsequently changed his way of writing. Then he considers the transition from printed books to digital literature from the point of view of the reader also in regards of the aesthetics of digital born literature. In the end he gives his opinion about the status of electronic literature in the academic field.

In this interview Dene Grigar tells about her approach to electronic literature in the early 1990s and about her work as curator for the exhibit "Electronic Literature and Its Emerging Forms" in 2015. She goes on describing some distinguishing features of electronic literature and explaining her 'conceptual shift' on regard to the way of working with computers. Finally she suggests some methods of analysis for the understanding of electronic literature for both academic scholars and mainstream audience.