New Literacies Blog #1

“The distinctive contribution of the approach to literacy as a 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) 

After reading the material that was given, I agree with the quote that literacy is a social practice, and I believe that the quote is even more apparent when it comes to new literacy. For example, Gillen and Barton discuss how new literacies benefit students when they work in a small group. One tool that was talked about was created by the Synergynet Project Team, who created a multi-touch table that is made for a classroom and allows up to four or five students to touch the board at the same time (2010, p.13-14). This tool is perfect for students to collaborate on small group projects. Gilen and Barton touched on how students can create their own piece of work on the table and then pass the table on to another group of students. This next group of students can either edit the group's project, or they can leave comments on the project to talk about what they liked and what can be improved.

Gilen and Barton said it best when talking about the multi-touch table by saying, “The intuitive nature of the interface being developed using touch and gesture provides direct interaction physically and personally with the digital information displayed. This collaborative combination of multiple interactions is an instantiation of a new, collaborative literacy practice.” (2010, p.14). I believe that a small group project like this is effective for students socially and professionally. Having students perform projects on the multi-touch table is effective for students professionally because students will grow up and get jobs. For pretty much every job that there is, people have to collaborate. I firmly believe that when people collaborate with each other effectively, it creates great success for the group and their ultimate goals. Therefore, having students do small group projects on the multi-touch table would help students build their collaborative skills. As the authors touched on, the multi-touch table provides direct interaction that is physical and personal. Students gain great social skills when collaborating on these projects.  Having the ability to have multiple students touch the table at the same time increases the opportunity for students to communicate with each other. So, the more communication that the students have with one another, the more that they build on their social skills. Furthermore, having a technology tool that is as fascinating as the table, allows students to have great excitement about their projects. Students can bond over the devices, which could help create friendships and a positive classroom environment.

The change from traditional literacy, which involved  no technology, to new literacy that involves only technology has been fascinating to watch overtime. I went through elementary and middle school using little technology. Technology was improving every day, but not to the extent that it has now. We would have collaborative projects and assignments that we would have to do, but not as much compared to when I went into high school and college. Technology was starting to evolve at a rapid pace, it became easier to share presentations and documents with other students that you were working with. You could let people edit or leave comments on your work. Teachers can give students assignments where they have to research a specific topic and find documents to help support their assignment. My high school at the time had a large amount of chrome books in the library that you could check out. Every student didn’t have their own Chromebooks just yet. Nevertheless, this evolving change started to make collaborative work more profound. I worked on many presentations and research papers with other classmates during my time in high school and college. Now, the increase in collaborative work could have been just because of my shift from middle school to high school, and that students became more capable of doing group work as they get older. But, I do believe that technology and how easy it became to work with students outside of school is a major component to the increase in collaborative work. Nevertheless, this experience in high school and college definitely helped my collaborative working skills with other colleagues, and also created some good friendships along the way. I became great friends with some people I would never have thought I would have gotten along with, because we were paired to do collaborative projects together, and I’m forever grateful because of it.

References:

Gillen, J., & Barton, D.. Digital Literacies. Lancaster University.

 https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/33471/1/DigitalLiteracies.pdf