The Five New Literacies of Web 2.0
Posted by Paul Allison on August 18th, 2006
Maybe there’s something magical about the number five.
Sunni Muslims have Five Pillars of Islam (Wikipedia). Science educators have five Habits of Mind (Science for All Americans Online). And Debbie Meier created five Habits of Mind (Essential Schools) at Central Park East Secondary School. They are:
- The question of evidence, or “How do we know what we know?”
- The question of viewpoint in all its multiplicity, or “Who’s speaking?”
- The search for connection and patterns, or “What causes what?”
- Supposition, or “How might things have been different?”
- Why any of it matters, or “Who cares?”
If you were to limit yoursleves to the top five, what are the tools that you want to use this school year (notice the emphasis on the personal and the practical) to take advantage of the new Web 2.0 literacies?
Would you add anything to this list?
- blogging (with images)
- writely and wikis
- podcasting, webcasting, video-conferencing
- social networking and aggregators (rss and tags)
- digital storytelling (e.g. mapping)
technorati tags:blogging, writely, podcasting, socialNetworking, mapping, images
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August 20th, 2006 at 2:32 pm
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August 22nd, 2006 at 12:13 pm
In response to the question of “five new literacies,” I’d like to reference an article by Don Leu, to be published soon in a book by the International Reading Association (http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~djleu/newlit.html).
Leu says, among other things:
“The new literacies include the skills, strategies, and insights necessary to successfully exploit the rapidly changing information and communication technologies that continuously emerge in our world. A more precise definition of the new literacies may never be possible to achieve since their most important characteristic is that they regularly change; as new technologies for information and communication continually appear, new literacies emerge (Bruce, 1997; Leu, in press a; Reinking, 1998). Moreover, these changes often take place faster than we are able to completely evaluate them. Regular change is a defining characteristic of the new literacies.
This simple observation has profound consequences for literacy and literacy education. The continuously changing technologies of literacy mean that we must help children learn how to learn new technologies of literacy. In fact, the ability to learn continuously changing technologies for literacy may be a more critical target than learning any particular technology of literacy itself.”
So perhaps the point isn’t to come up with any finite number of “new literacies,” but, as Leu attempts to do, try to understand aspects of these new literacies that are widely applicable to new technologies.
August 25th, 2006 at 9:01 am
Perhaps I should clarify. The title of my original post is misleading. I agree with Paul Oh that children need to learn how to learn the new technologies of literacy! Thanks for adding this Paul. Still, the intention of my list is to check in with people with what specific technologies they will be using this year in their classrooms with their students.