Posts Tagged ‘literacy’

New book on Digital Education

Wednesday, February 9th, 2011

Digital Education: Opportunities for Social Collaboration (2011) published this week.

Edited by Michael Thomas, University of Central Lancashire, UK
Palgrave Macmillan
A volume in the Palgrave Macmillan series, “Digital Education and Learning” (series editors, Michael Thomas, James Paul Gee, Marc Prensky)
Webpage: http://us.macmillan.com/digitaleducation

digitaleducation1

“This volume is at once a wake-up call to 21st-century educators and an intriguing glimpse at possible futures for teaching and learning with digital technologies.” –Kenneth Reeder, Professor, Department of Language and Literacy Education, the University of British Columbia

“Digital Education introduces a healthy corrective to exaggerated techno-optimism or techno-pessimism. The thought-provoking edited collection represents one of the first serious attempts to examine how Web 2.0 may not only improve but also help transform education. Contributors to the book bring a wide range of social theory to the task … And they apply this theory to examining incipient efforts to deploy Web 2.0 tools in a broad range of formal educational settings, especially at the tertiary and adult level. Chapters from and about Australia, Canada, Germany, Indonesia, South Africa, Spain, the UK, the US, and Venezuela result in a diverse international discussion that is not common in educational research, and this breadth helps us to better understand the relationship of theory to practice. … The contributions in this book represent an especially broad and thoughtful overview of where we have come on these issues and where we stand today.” –Professor Mark Warschauer, University of California, Irvine

From digital literacy to computational literacy

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

The International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations was recently launched and its first issue is available for free online. One of the articles by Steinkuehler and Johnson talks about the need for ‘computational literacy’: ‘ Based on our analysis, we argue for reconsideration of computer literacy as computational literacy, authorship as collaborative and negotiated rather than individually achieved, and digital media literacy
practice as one involving design and production, not merely passive or critical consumption.’

I very much like this idea of ‘literacy’ as a dynamic, and social capacity. Although Steinkuehler and Johnson do relate this to language learning, I do see overlap with for example the use of technology-mediated tasks (as attested in the book I recently edited with Michael Thomas). How can we involve learners in language production that is grounded in meaningful, social interaction, and that involves ‘building’ something (either an online character or a network or a strategy) in a game environment with language?