New Literacies and Adolescent Learners: An Interview With Julie Coiro (original) (raw)

The New Literacies of Online Reading Comprehension: Expanding the Literacy and Learning Curriculum

Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 2011

and new social practices of literacy quickly emerge. Historically, literacy has always changed (Manguel, 1996), but over substantial periods of time. Today, however, the emergence of the Internet has brought about a period of rapid, continuous technological change and, as a result, rapid, continuous change in the nature of literacy. The Internet is the most efficient system in the history of civilization for delivering new technologies that require new skills to read, write, and communicate effectively. It is also an amazingly efficient system for rapidly disseminating new social practices for the use of these technologies (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006). As a result, new technologies and new social practices rapidly and repeatedly redefine what it once meant, in a simpler world, to be able to read, write, and communicate effectively. To be literate today often means being able to use some combination of blogs, wikis, texting, search engines, Facebook, foursquare, Google Docs, Skype, Chrome, iMovie, Contribute, Basecamp, or many other relatively new technologies, including thousands of mobile applications, or "apps." To be literate tomorrow will be defined by even newer technologies that have yet to appear and even newer social practices that we will create to meet unanticipated needs. Thus, the very nature of literacy continuously changes; literacy is deictic. It is becoming increasingly clear that the deictic nature of literacy will require us to continuously rethink traditional notions of literacy.

Complexities of Teaching New Literacies in Our Classrooms

This was an essay Joshua Caton and I were invited to write for the Ohio Resource Center's magazine Adolescent Literacies in Perspective. In brief, we make an argument based on our teaching experiences for shifting our focus to the social/literacy practices within which technology use is embedded rather than focusing on the transformative affordances of the technology itself. Though this is not a new argument, it is one Josh and I feel we don't read/hear enough in discussions with English teachers about new literacies, digital literacies, and/or 21st century literacies.