Desinging To Learn

Intro In chapter five of New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Social Learning Third Ed by Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel the reader begins to take a detailed look at the practices of blogs and wikis. Much like the changes as seen in web 1.0 to web 2.0, it can be noted that the participation, authorship, and readership of blogs and wikis has changed dramatically since the development and implementation of accessible user interfaces and publishing mediums. Lankshear and Knobel mention this when referring to the limitation of blogs as seen in the 90’s, because blogging in the 90’s required some knowledge of HTML. Fifteen years later, we can see the explosion of blogs, and microblogging in conjunction with social media and accessibility on mobile devices. The result of this ease of access and mobility is diverse content and practices amongst bloggings offering multi-faceted dimensions of engagement in our lives (Lankshear & Knobel, 2011, p. 142-144). Blogs Interesting...

Moving from literacy and ‘new literacies’ to D iscourse. In chapter one of New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Social Learning Ed by Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel . I learned about literacy as a historical concept and a social practice. I also learned about new literacies as ‘paradigmatic’ and ‘ontological’ (Lankshear & Knobel, 2011, p. 27). In chapter two I began to learn more about literacy as a social practice through Discourses and encoded texts. “Hence, literacies are ‘socially recognized ways in which people generate, communicate, and negotiate meanings, as members of Discourses, through the medium of encoded texts.”  (Lankshear & Knobel, 2011, p. 50). As a social practice one can think of literacy as observable ‘things’ humans do with their bodies and minds to create meaning. Lankshear and Knobel cite the work of Scribner and Cole to describe these practices as “consisting of three components: technology, knowledge, and skills. (ibid,: 2...

Background As a primer to UC Denver’s INTE 5340 Digital Storytelling course, I decided to take my professor’s advice and begin an early read of the course text New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Social Learning by Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel . Source: Amazon.com When the book arrived three weeks ago I was intrigued to see a cover with what looks like web interfaces and digital icons for different social media platforms. I can honestly say that I could only identify half of the icons on the cover and only regularly use a couple of the platforms. I didn’t have a Twitter account until a couple of weeks ago and I have only used Facebook for a year. Never the less, I was excited to learn about these ‘new literacies’ and perhaps face the fact that in terms of literacy, in this context, I am in some ways ‘illiterate.’ In conjunction with the course text for course work in INTE 5340, students focused on a theme of one’s choosing based on personal interest. As an inst...