Quote:
"Some debate exists over whether educators should embrace SNS and use it for learning
purposes or whether they should leave it for youth to have as their own form of networking
and communicating.
Will the fun of social networking be lost if it is incorporated into
classrooms for different purposes than what students normally use it or will this mode engage
students further in the learning process?"
Explanation of Quote:
I chose this quote because I never considered "losing the fun" when incorporating Social Networking Sites. After last weeks reading, I was completely on board for incorporating social networking in school. I still think this. However, this did have me consider to not make it something miserable. We don't want to use social networking to post a boring 10 page, double-spaced paper, with no discussion. We don't want to lose the "social" aspect of SNS. I think teachers just need to teach proper usage and use SNS as a way to have digital classroom discussions and sharing. It is important to not completely blend home life with school life. You're students don't need to see your Facebook pictures from your recent vacation. Its the enjoyable social environment that needs duplicated in the classroom. It's the fact that the student that has been sitting quietly in the corner all year, might share and express themselves through social networking.
Additional Reference:
Source: http://www.shinyshiny.tv/24-pupil-fb-friend.jpg
Explanation of Additional Reference:
Agreeing that Social Networking would be beneficial in the classroom doesn't mean that all your private home social networking sites now need to be in the classroom. Teachers should ask themselves, "What make social networking enjoyable to my students and what aspects of that
can enter the classroom?"
Questions:
1. What makes a literacy practice a "new literacy"?
- New literacies are not merely technical or ‘operational’ competencies but are situated within a new mindset about knowledge. Lankshear and Knobel (2006) distinguish new literacies from conventional literacies in that the more a literacy practice privileges participation over publishing, distributed expertise over centralized enterprise, collective intelligence over individual possessive intelligence, collaboration over individuated authorship, dispersion over scarcity, sharing over ownership, innovation and evolution over stability and fixity … the more we should regard it as a ‘new’ literacy. (p. 21)
2. How does might Citizen Journalism support the development of "new literacies"?
- Citizen Journalism definitely "privileges participation over publishing, distributed expertise over centralized enterprise, collective intelligence over individual possessive intelligence, collaboration over individuated authorship, dispersion over scarcity, sharing over ownership, innovation and evolution over stability and fixity."
- Citizen Journalism involves high levels of collaboration and sharing.
3. What is critical literacy and how does your Citizen Journalism project encourage critical literacy? How might you change your project to encourage critical literacy?
- "A critical literacy framework views discourse, including information, through a political, social, and economic lens (Fabos, 2004; Kapitzke, 2003; Lankshear & McClaren, 1993). Teachers of critical literacy encourage their students to deconstruct the text by understanding the foundation and conflicts that lie beneath the surface content and the relationship that the text holds with other text(s). They encourage readers to examine issues of class, gender, race, culture, and hegemony in the aim to advance democracy. Students need to understand that all text including the complex text of the internet is built on economic, political, and ideological interests (Selwyn, 2009)."
- Citizen Journalism causes students to sharpen their analytic skills. Students search for valid answers. They conduct their own primary research. In a way, they shape their projects based off their own ideological interests.
4. What problems may arise when students use Web 2.0 tools for learning in school and how might teachers capitalize on these opportunities to promote information literacy?
- "In partaking in collaborative wiki contributions, problems may arise surrounding ownership of work. Does the whole story belong to all students who contributed to it? Do students only have ownership rights to the portions on which they contributed? These questions need discussion and facilitation at the outset of such projects. Researchers claim that infusing new genres such as wikis, blogs and txting into content learning, not just language arts, needs more attention (Selwyn, 2009; Walker, 2010)."
- Teachers can capitalize on these opportunities to answer these questions. Teachers can show students how to responsibly use and browse Web 2.0 information.
Citation:
Asselin, M. & Moayeri, M. (2011). Practical Strategies: The Participatory Classroom: Web 2.0 in the Classroom.
Literacy Learning: The Middle Years 19(2).
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