Computers, literacy and thinking together

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 1996

The New Literacy 97 is to abandon the assumption of a fixed distinction between oral and literate societies and separation between spoken and written language, and to explore the relationship between orality and literacy in cultural context. The cross-disciplinary approach makes for a broad view of the range of considerations of literacy: from microethnographic, to deeply historical, to inclusion of nontextual modes. These six edited books contain a total of 85 articles, only one of which is repeated. Since it is impossible to give attention to all of the articles individually, I will give a brief overview of each book and then discuss some of the foundations, themes, approaches, and applications that are most interesting and important for linguistic anthropologists. The three Open University books (Graddol, Maybin, and Stierer, eds.; Maybin, ed.; and Stierer and Maybin, eds.) are part of a four-volume set for a course at the School of Education at The Open University (U.K.) called "Language and Literacy in Social Context." (The fourth, less relevant to print literacy, is Media Texts: Authors and Readers, edited by David Graddol and Oliver Boyd-Barrett). All but 6 of the 48 Open University articles have appeared elsewhere. The introductory material for each volume consists mostly of brief abstracts of the papers, and the editors provide no interpretation of the collections. Language and Literacy in Social Practice provides a general view of literacy as part of social practice, treating historical, cross-cultural and political perspectives on literacy as language in use, including ethnographic accounts from schools, homes, and cultural settings. This book could serve as a general reader for a course on literacy because of the inclusion of background and classic readings from Malinowski, Hymes, Halliday, Voloshinov, Heath, and Freire. While most selections are appropriate, others, such as that from Voloshinov, are rendered incomprehensible by decontextualization. Language, Literacy, and Learning in Educational Practice takes a more educational and psychological perspective, with historical readings from Vygotsky and Bruner. Where it addresses current educational trends, policies and projects in Great Britain, it becomes a venue for in-group battles between advocates of various factions. To the extent that authors stay close to the local issues without connecting them to broader phenomena, the usefulness of the work for scholars outside the United Kingdom is correspondingly limited. But as a case study of the application of a particular orientation to literacy in a particular situation, it is illuminating. Researching Language and Literacy in Social Context is oriented toward applying ethnographic approaches to classroom research. Three general papers introduce ethnographic theory, ethics, and methods. The rest of the book consists of papers that demonstrate the application of ethnography to a range of phenomena in a variety of classrooms. The combination of theory and application gives the volume a good balance. For linguistic anthropologists, the three most interesting collections are those edited by Street, by Boyarin, and by John-Steiner, Panofsky, and Smith, because they contain the most recent material, the most explicitly cross-cultural perspectives, and the more sophisticated theory. All three

DigitalStream Proceedings, 2008

This talk considers relationships between technology and language use from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives, with examples from various languages. Rather than taking a technologically deterministic view, it emphasizes how writing systems and technologies reflect the cultures of reading they serve. Correspondingly, it argues that technology has always been intertwined with literacy, and therefore, what is sometimes called "technology" or "electronic" literacy is underlain by issues that go back to the earliest forms of writing. New logics and practices associated with digital information and communication technologies need to be understood in this light. General implications for second/foreign language and literacy teaching are presented

Journal of Literacy Research, 2007

Have you ever thought how you became literate? What influences-social, historical, political, technological-surrounded you and had an impact? What about how you came to be computer literate (or perhaps you do not consider yourself in this category)? What these books by Inman, and Selfe and Hawisher, bring to the area of technology and literacy instruction and composition studies is the human voices, the recognition that obtaining effective technological literacy is a complex web of interacting forces. They recognize that acquiring technological literacies-"literacy" in today's society-and associated practices cannot be described in a simple single cause-single effect way.

In this chapter we discuss the impact of digital technologies on notions of literacy and critically explore literacy as normally understood by school curricula (as developing reading, writing and spelling) in relation to ‘new literacies’ (relating to the production and reception of digital and multimodal artefacts and representations as social and situated practices). The chapter also explores related cultural practices of learners in everyday life and explores their relationship to school-based learning.

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2021

Literacy is a linguistic innovation characterised by the encoding and decoding of language into a system of visual signs whose relevance to daily life in most societies cannot be overstated. Understood to be both a technology and a social practice, literacy has been the subject of anthropological inquiry since the late nineteenth century, with protracted debates about its effects on human consciousness and social life. This entry tracks the development of literacy as a concept. Initially dominated by technologically deterministic assertions that literacy was a tool for sociocultural and cognitive development, anthropology would later embrace the more culturally relativistic perspective advanced by the New Literacy Studies movement of the 1980s and 1990s. This movement sought to understand how cultural logics and norms informed the development of localised literacy practices, thus creating variations of ‘literacies’ which were themselves embedded within ideologies and structures of power relations. Coming to recognise the marginalising power of standardised literacy, anthropology turned its attention to education. Anthropologists and educators have become partners in research dedicated to developing pedagogical practices that draw upon the unique linguistic resources and practices that students bring with them into the classroom to cultivate inclusivity and empowerment. The increasing prevalence of digital technologies in all aspects of daily life have challenged earlier notions of literacy, inspiring anthropologists to investigate how people draw upon multiple modalities to encode and decode meaning, thereby fundamentally reshaping our understanding of what it means to ‘read and write’.

1998

eyond literacv begins a realm which for manv is still science fiction. The name civi-B ' lization of illiteracy is used to define direction and to point out markers. The richness and diversiry of this realm is indicative of the nature , of our own practical experiences of self-constituticon. One marker along the road from present to future leaves no room for doubt: the digital foundation of the pragmatic framework. Rut this does not mean that the current dynamics of change can be reduced to the victorious march of the digital or of technology, in general. Having challenged the model of a dominant sign system-language and its literate experience-we suggested that a multitude of various sign processes effectively override the need for and justification of literacy in a context of higher efficiency expectations. We could alternatively define the pragmatic framework of the civilization of illiteracy as semiotic in the sense that human practical experiences become more and more subject to sign processes. The digital engine is, in final analysis, a semiotic machine, churning out a variety of signs. Nevertheless, the semiotization of human practical experiences extends beyond computers and symbolic processing. The realization that we must go beyond literacv does not come easy and does not follow the logic of the current modus operandi of the scholars and educators who have a stake in literacv and tradition. Their logic is itself so deeply rooted in the experience of written language that it is only natural to extend it to the inference that without literacy the human being loses a fundamental dimension. The sophistry is easy to catch, however. The conclusion implies that the practical experience of language is identical to literacy. As we know, this is not the case. Orality, of more consequence in our day than the majority are aware of, and in more languages that do not have a writing system, supports human existence in a universe of extreme expressive richness and variety. The University of Doubt Literacy-based education, as all other literacy experiences , assumes that people are the same. It presumes that each human being can and must be literate. Just as the goa1 of industry was to turn out standardized products , education assumes the same task through the mold of literacy. Diplomas and certificates testify how like the mold the product is. The question of why we should expect uniform cognitive structures covering the literate use of language or numbers, but not the use of sounds, colors, shapes, and volume, is never raised. Tremendous effort is made to help individuals who simply cannot execute the sequentiality of writing or the meaning of successive numbers. Nothing similar is done to address cognitive characteristics of persons inclined to means different from literacy. In order to respond to the needs of the pragmatics of high effi-ciencv leading to the civilization of many literacies, education needs first of all to rediscover the individual, and his or her extensive gamut of cognitive characteristics. I use the word rediscover having in mind incipient forms of education and training, which were more on a one-to-one or one-to-few basis. Education also needs to reconsider its expectation of a universal common

Over the past two decades, following the publication and widespread take-up of the New London Group's landmark call to action: A pedagogy of multiliteracies, teachers, researchers, and policy makers have been refocusing teaching and learning for an emergent global society that is interconnected in real time and space, and, simultaneously, in a virtual dimension that was only vaguely perceived in 1996. A pedagogy of multiliteracies signalled the pressing need to lift the concept of literacy off the linguistically and technologically restricted page towards complex, hybridized multimedia literacies that spill across the ephemeral borders of education, literacy, second language acquisition, media literacy, cultural studies, and applied linguistics. As the static, unidirectional 2D world on paper has disintegrated into dynamic, multidirectional, crowd-sourced, cloud-based knowledge construction, individually measurable reading-writing-listening-speaking skills have given way to cognitively-distributed problem-solving, using a digital toolkit enabling collaborative R/W authoring; plurilingual and multimodal design; ludic and maker pedagogies; even post-human communication with bots. In this wildly changing communication landscape, interdisciplinarity is an essential coping mechanism. In 2002, I walked into an inner city elementary school in northwest Toronto as a researcher, wanting to understand how multiliteracies were reshaping the coalface of emergent literacy. They weren't, but the principal was keen to understand how to improve learning for a 90% immigrant population. The school had a mandate to use what was then naively described as technology to boost the chances of success for children who were poor, and had little, if any, knowledge of English, much less of the cultural complexities of Canadian identity. Through shared " how do we do this? " problem-solving, we formed a small school-university working group to try out new ideas for bringing children's linguistic and cultural knowledge—their funds of knowledge (Moll et al, 1992)—into digital cross-curricular literacy projects. As our learning community grew, it became a regular theory-practice workshop timetabled into the school day, where a core of dedicated educators and researchers met to plan, and conduct pedagogical interventions across classes, grades, and subjects to inject the languages of the community into digitally-supported, multimodal projects (see: Lotherington, 2011). Over a decade, we rewrote literacy education, school culture, and our own understandings of learning, responding in the process to challenges about how to teach a class of 25 children speaking 16 different languages, and how to cope with the incessant rate of technological change. This presentation describes our dialogic learning process, and pedagogical experimentation, and showcases a sample of elementary school children's beautiful plurilingual, multimodal products.

Nordic Journal of Literacy Research, 2015

Writing has been invented many times but the alphabet only once, according to Walter Ong in his book Orality and Literacy. His point is that there are many different ways of representing the world, which form the basis of the earliest writing systems. What is radically different about alphabetic scripts is that they do not represent objects in the world, but spoken language. The alphabetic principle means that written characters represent speech sounds. Those characters resemble nothing but themselves and have an entirely arbitrary relationship with the sounds they represent. Hence an important part of the history of writing is the establishment of conventions identifying the sounds that are relevant to be distinguished in the stream of speech and determining the representations to be used for those sounds. In fact, writing technologises the spoken word. The technologies used have evolved over the history of writing, with the invention of printing and the Internet as key milestones, but that first invention remains as fascinating as ever*not least when new people are introduced to the world of writing. Reading in the sense of mastering the technology of writing is about entering the script in order to be able to enter texts and the world of meaning that is hidden inside them. However, it is also important to step outside the text to view it from a position of independence and mastery, which amounts to entering a community of written culture. Such an historical and progressional approach to literacy actually has the potential to bring the research field together, in that this field can then be seen as dealing with a single issue of access, but at three different levels. These levels are most often treated separately in contemporary literacy research. The first level deals with access to writing and not least with difficulties gaining access to it. This is a large and well-established field using a wide range of methods, from case studies to experimental designs in controlled settings. The second level concerns access to texts and is investigated by reading and writing researchers who take an interest in individuals' cognitive processes and sometimes also in how the environment affects individuals' skills and performance. These two traditions share the same favourite hunting ground: the classroom. The third level, access to textual cultures, represents a unifying concept in the research field often referred to as new literacy studies (NLS), which is well established in Anglo-American countries. The founding idea of NLS was to break away from the belief that literacy and school are two sides of the same coin. This led to a move away from the individual perspective and from educational contexts, and to an active search for meaningful patterns in social

2008

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2013