Why Teach New Media Writing?

June 23, 2009

Reason one--

skill

“Writing, Technology, and Teens”

“Teens write a lot, but they do not think of their emails, instant and text messages as writing. This disconnect matters because teens believe good writing is an essential skill for success and that more writing instruction at school would help them.”

--Pew/Internet--National Commission on Writing

(College Board) April 2008

“A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures”

“new communications media are reshaping the way we use language. When technologies of meaning are changing so rapidly, there cannot be one set of standards or skills that constitute the ends of literacy learning, however taught”

--New London Group

Reason two—

complexity

“. . . learning is or should be both frustrating and life enhancing. The key is finding ways to make hard things life enhancing so that people keep going and don’t fall back on learning and thinking only what is simple and easy.”

--James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy

Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter

Reason three--

engagement

“The first national survey of its kind finds that virtually all American teens play computer, console, or cell phone games and that the gaming experience is rich and varied, with a significant amount of social interaction and potential for civic engagement.”

--Pew Internet & American Life Project, Sept. 2008

What Video games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy

“Three things, then, are involved in active learning: experiencing the world in new ways, forming new affiliations, and preparation for future learning.”

--James Paul Gee

Communities of Practice:Learning, Meaning, and Identity

Four premises of Etienne Wenger’s social theory of learning:

1) We are social beings. . . . This fact is a central aspect of learning.

2) Knowledge is a matter of competence with respect to valued enterprises (singing in tune, etc.)

3) Knowing is a matter of participating in the pursuit of such enterprises, that is, of active engagement in the world.

4) Meaning—our ability to experience the world and our engagement with it as meaningful—is ultimately what learning is to produce.

Reason four:

agents of change

“Twitter Revolution”

“The key concept we introduce is that of Design, in which we are both inheritors of patterns and conventions of meaning and at the same time active designers of meaning. And, as designers of meaning, we are designers of social futures - workplace futures, public futures, and community futures.” --New London Group

Multiliteracies for a Digital Age--Stuart A. Selber

Functional literacy (technology as tool)

Critical literacy (technology as cultural artifact)

Rhetorical literacy (reflective producer of technology)