Multiliteracies:Challenges of Literacy Education in C21stPetra Aczél, PhD habil.Corvinus University of Budapest

Recent findings

”There is no ’one size fits all’ policy” - EU Kids Online (2011-2014)

”Digital amnesia” – Kaspersky Lab, 2015

”Shorter attention span than a goldfish” – Microsoft Corp., 2015

”Schools wasting money on computers for kids” – OECD 2015: Students, Computers and Learning: Making The Connectionwww.uni-corvinus.hu/tkar 2

Attention economy White noise

Time span of focused attention (drops from 12 mins. to 6 mins. /Lloyds TSB/, from 12 secs. to 8 secs., Microsoft)

Information overload: 82%

Multitasking, sidetracking (Stanford 2009-C. Nass: ”multitaskers are suckers for irrelevancy”)

Information gaining, message creation, meaning-making Reading less/more? Writing less/more? (Pew, 2011, A. Lunsford, 2010,

KidComm2, 2012)

Meaning-making: understandig/interpreting?

(Pisa, 2012)

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New media as the agency of transformation

Fluidity (Manovich, 2001)

Interactive, smart, customized technologies

Convergence and circulation (Jenkins 2008, Jenkins et al 2013)

Semantic Web

The Big Data (d. boyd, 2012)

Virtual realities and augmented realities (Furht 2011) Aggregation and fragmentation (Napoli 2011)

Cultural conflict in education

X-Y-Z and Alpha Gens, Millennials, Always-on Gen, Net Gen, Supernow Gen

Digital natives and immigrants (digital hermits, digital nomades, digital wayfarers, digital settlers) (Prensky 2001, Buda 2013)

Hunters and farmers (Hartmann 1997, 2005)

Traditional curriculum and future content, serious and playful content (Prensky 2001)

Niche-learning (Coursera)

New skills and activities

Multitasking (supertasking)

Texting and hyperreading (Crystal 2008, Lunsford 2009)

Viral, networked learning, wiki-knowledge (Tapscott 2001, 2013)

8 norms for new information behaviour 1) freedom; 2) customization ; 3) scrutiny; 4) integrity; 5) collaboration; 6) entertainment; 7) speed; 8) innovation.

”Students need to be able to think creatively, critically, and collaboratively; to master the "basics" and excel in reading, math, science, and information literacy, and respond to opportunities and challenges with speed, agility, and innovation . Students need to expand their knowledge beyond the doors of their local community to become responsible and contributing global citizens in the increasingly complex world economy.” (Tapscott, 2013)

Multiliteracy

Ideals of multiliteracy

Self expression: cultural ideal Participation: democratic ideal Competitiveness: ideal of the

knowledge- and information society

Multiliteracies 1 CONTEXT

The variability of meaning making in different cultural, social or domain-specific contexts.

”This means that it is no longer enough for literacy teaching to focus solely on the rules of standard forms of the national language. Rather, the business of communication and representation of meaning today increasingly requires that learners are able figure out differences in patterns of meaning from one context to another. These differences are the consequence of any number of factors, including culture, gender, life experience, subject matter, social or subject domain and the like. Every meaning exchange is cross-cultural to a certain degree.” (Kalantzis-Cope)

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Multiliteracies 2 TECHNOLOGY

Task of literacy education is ”to extend the range of literacy pedagogy so that it does not unduly privilege alphabetical representations, but brings into the classroom multimodal representations, and particularly those typical of the new, digital media.

This makes literacy pedagogy all the more engaging for its manifest connections with today’s communications milieu.” (Kalantzis-Cope)

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Multiliteracy (Selber, 2004) Functional

Critical

Rhetorical

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7 C’s of ML (Hoechsmann-Poyntz) Consciousness Communication Consumption and surveillance Convergence Creativity Copy-paste Community

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Conclusions 1. New information behaviours both base and affect the

levels of literacy.

2. Literacy skills support digital skills.

3. Texts tend to be multimedial/interactive (or have the capacity to become multimedial).

4. Multiliteracies entail the local-global, the individual-cultural and the human-technological.

5. Formal (literacy) education should ’reconsider’ its own traditions and aims in terms of new media/multiliteracy challenges and research findings.