New Media and New Literacies, a course offered by Dr. Susan Forbes at SUNY Empire State College, has truly been a journey of discovery in several different ways. My thinking about emerging technology and the future of technology has changed as I have come to realize how the new participatory culture causes new forms of literacy to intersect, diverge and impact the way that we learn. Through relevant blog posts and other online activities, I have become a true member of the participatory culture. According to the Varnelis text, participatory culture means that "a good deal more that human beings value can now be done by individuals, who interact with each other socially, as human beings and as social beings, rather than as market actors through the price system” (Russell, Ito, Richmond & Tuters, 2008 pg.46).
In addition, the day that collective knowledge becomes valued has come as Wikipedia is recognized for the value of collective knowledge and knowledge sharing online. This is truly an “Ah Hah” moment for everyone who is ethically and socially concerned with the integrity of the Internet as a place for knowledge consumption, creation and sharing. The time frame for celebrating the acknowledgment of collective knowledge is brief, due to the fact that power struggles exist within corporations who literally control access and bandwidth to the Internet, and that laws governing these corporations can change at any time. This would severely impact the average user and limit the ability to be fully participatory online.
When I think back on the readings for this course, I still become excited about the possibilities that are presented to web users today, and the technologies that will allow for even more freedom to become creators of knowledge and information in the future. I am happy to see that news is now consumed and created by regular people, and not controlled by a few large corporations who have taken advantage of the news monopolies for far too long.
During this course, we explored the question: What counts as literacy? Overbaugh states that "any endeavor that requires remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating and creating counts as a type of literacy (n.d.). We learned that literacy and many faces, some of which diverge and intersect-we are witnessing the evolution of new languages and forms of communication. "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).
As "more and more technologies become available, they are increasingly deployed in working and playing with texts, in the practice of new and different literacies" (Literacy and the new technologies in school education, 2014). In addition, "Meeting the challenge of new forms of textual practice and media culture and new relations between literacy and IT is likely to play an ever-increasingly significant role in teachers' professional lives, as indeed in society more generally" (Literacy, 2014). The authors explain that teachers and educational institutions need to find ways of re-framing existing ideas about text, language and literacies in order to keep up with the new ways that young people are learning today.
The value of online communication and emerging technologies cannot be underestimated from the standpoint of learning practitioners. Online methods of teaching and learning are improving all the time, and they are not going to disappear. Since online methods of teaching and learning are here to stay, it is of great benefit for educators to fully grasp the intricacies of online learning through study of best practices.
Reference
Gillen, J., & Barton, D. (2010). Digital Literacies. Technology Enhanced
Learning. Retrieved from http://www.tlrp.org/docs/DigitalLiteracies.pdf
Literacy and the new technologies in school education: Meeting the l(IT)eracy challenge?.
(n.d.) >The Free Library. (2014). Retrieved Sep 21 2014 from http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Literacy+and+the+new+technologies+in+school+education%3a+Mee ting+the...-a063132991
Overbaugh, R. (n.d.). Bloom's Taxonomy. Retrieved from
http://ww2.odu.edu/educ/roverbau/Bloom/blooms_taxonomy.htm
Russell, A., Ito, M., Richmond, T., & Tuters, M. (2008). Culture: Media Convergence and
Networked Participation. In Networked Publics (pp. 43-76). Boston, MA: The MIT Press.
