A New Literacies Sampler. Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear, New York: Peter Lang, 2007.

Writing online provides us with the opportunity to ‘author the self’, to sustain a narrative of identity (Giddens 1991) and even to explore a number of different stories of the self, but these identities always are forged through our connection with others. (192)

Those who have followed fields of visual literacy and media literacy will not be surprised that a new array of digital “texts” requires a new literacy movement. This volume provides a number of essays probing aspects of “new literacies” research.

Here’s one author’s definition:

… the more a literacy practice privileges participation over publishing, distributed expertise over centralized expertise, collective intelligence over individual possessive intelligence, collaboration over individuated authorship, dispersion over scarcity, sharing over ownership, experimentation over ‘normalization,’ innovation and evolution over stability and fixity, creative-innovative rule breaking over generic purity and policing, relationship over information broadcast, and so on, the more we should regard it as a ‘new’ literacy. (21)

Samples of all this covered in the volume’s essays include: laptops in the classroom; popular student Websites; video games; fan fiction; academic blogging; and online memes.

The opening essay, written by the volume’s editors, discusses sampling techniques in this new field – research undertaken from a sociocultural perspective on literacy. The concluding essay by Cynthia Lewis provides a helpful overview of the other authors’ research. Lewis notes that these literacies are connected with identities, patterns, and ways of being in the world rather than solely with the acts of reading and writing.” (230)

Every essay has a helpful list of references on the particular topic. Many of these references are ‘forthcoming’ so this is clearly a field of research under development. Two authors are cited repeatedly in these reference lists: James Paul Gee, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Kevin M. Leander, Associate Professor in Language, Literacy, and Culture at Vanderbilt University. Since both of these authors are represented in this volume, I will explore their contributions more fully here.

Gee’s essay is entitled “Pleasure, Learning, Video Games, and Life: The Projective Stance”. Here Gee argues “that good video games create what I call a ‘projective stance’ – a double-sided stance towards the world (virtual or real) in terms of which we humans see the world simultaneously as a project imposed on us and as a site onto which we can actively project our desires, values, and goals”. (95-96) He notes: ‘… both language and games are semiotic systems for encoding experience in ways that ready human beings for actions they want or need to take”. (98) Gee analyzes several video games from this perspective.

Leander’s analysis in the volume relates to the contest between the curriculum and the class schedule when every student has a laptop. (I recall visiting a private academy in Dallas – one attended by Melinda Gates as a young woman – where every incoming student is provided with a laptop. Bill Gates urged the administrator to visit other schools to study the impact, somewhat subversive, that follows such innovation).

Leander provides several ‘vignettes of practice’ in the school he studied. Most of the conflict related to “the relationship between school space-time and space-time as practiced by youth on the internet in their everyday lives”. Another concept he studies is open and closed information spaces. Faculty who are reading this summary can identify with this contest once laptops and cell phones appear in their classroom.

This leads to a very practical question: what lessons are contained in this volume for teaching and research?

Based on my own academic experience, it is very helpful to think of digital tools from the perspective of new forms of literacy. We are accustomed to textual analysis so this gives us new texts to study. It is also helpful to listen to these authors who are, after all, very enthusiastic about the potential of virtual learning. We can discover new ways of relating to students who spend so much time in this space and with these tools.

However, these essays prompt us to think even beyond what is happening to students – to think of ways the classroom and educational institutions themselves will need to be re-structured in a digital culture. Another large issue appears briefly in this volume: the project of the self, as explored by Anthony Giddens (1991) and Sherry Turkle (1984). Giddens reminds us of “the emergence of new mechanisms of self-identity which are shaped by – yet also shape – the institutions of modernity”. (2) He notes:

The self is not a passive entity, determined by external influences; in forging their self-identities, no matter how local their specific contexts of action, individuals contribute to and directly promote social influences that are global in their consequences and implications. (2)

References

Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Turkle, S. (1984). The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. New York: Simon and Schuster.