Arianna Spiezio: New Media and New Literacies Blog

    New literacies are providing teachers and students with authentic experiences with diverse ways of learning in a world that is almost intimidated by diversity. These new forms of literacy are crucial in order to ensure our students are active participants in the digital age. Digital ways of communicating are the way of life and are going to be for the foreseeable future; with that being said, to participate in this communication, we must continue to learn and develop new literacies to promote academic growth, critical thinking, and a justice-seeking citizen.      Over the course of this module, I have developed a strong grasp on what "new literacy" means and why it is easily one of the most important contemporary issues in education. As Sang expressed, the language skills necessary to understand the world are changing and in order to maintain an understanding of the world around us, we must learn and teach these ideas (Sang, 2017). The National Council of Te...

     In the modern age we currently exist in, technology is a part of personal and professional life on a daily  basis. By technology, I mean the way we "generate, communicate, and negotiate meaningful content" (Knobel & Lankshear, 2007, p. 24), which also so happens to be the definition of literacy, according to Knobel and Lankshear (2007). The authors say new literacies are, "socially recognized ways of generating, communicating, and negotiating meaningful content through the medium of encoded texts within contexts of participation in Discourses." (Knobel & Lankshear, 2007, p. 24). New literacy has been designed, debated, redesigned, and interpreted to stray away from this stereotypical and outdated way of viewing literacy as simply the practice of reading and writing in formal English. Historically, American schools used traditional English as the foundation for education. However, we have learned over time that this simply does not work. In doing that, w...