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Digital Technologies: A new era inliteracy education?HELEN NIXON aa University of South Australia , Adelaide, AustraliaPublished online: 01 Jul 2010.
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Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education
Vol. 24, No. 2, August 2003
REVIEW ESSAY
Digital Technologies: a new era in literacy education?
HELEN NIXON, University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia
Teachers and Techno-literacies: managing literacy, technology and learn-
ing in schools
COLIN LANKSHEAR & ILANA SNYDER with BILL GREEN, 2000
Sydney, Allen & Unwin
xxi� 178 pp., ISBN 1-86448-946-4
Silicon Literacies: communication, innovation and education in the elec-
tronic age
ILANA SNYDER, 2002
London and New York, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
xii� 190 pp., ISBN 0-415-27668-3
Although microcomputers have been a feature of many Australian schools for over
twenty years, it was not until the advent of the personal multimedia and internet-capable
computer in the mid-1990s that English/literacy educators began to pay systematic
attention to the literacy–technology interface. Teachers and Techno-literacies: managing literacy,
technology and learning in schools written by Colin Lankshear and Ilana Snyder with Bill
Green, and Silicon Literacies: communication, innovation and education in the electronic age edited
by Ilana Snyder, both enter into dialogue with and contribute to current debates about
the complexity of contemporary literacy practices in the age of digital technologies. The
two books are complementary in that they argue that it is not tenable to try to
incorporate the new information and communication technologies (ICT) into conven-
tional literacy frameworks. Both books call on educators to develop the readiness to think
about the changing world of literacy–technology in informed and systematic ways, and
both books contribute to the theory and information base required to enable this to
happen.
The authors of these two books, Lankshear, Snyder and Green, were members of a
research consortium that carried out the first major piece of Australian research on
literacies and technologies in education in the mid-1990s, a project from which today’s
literacy educators and researchers are still able to learn a good deal. Funded by the
Commonwealth Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs
ISSN 0159-6306 print; 1469-3739 online/03/020263-09 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/0159630032000110775
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264 H. Nixon
(DEETYA) through the Children’s Literacy National Projects Program, and reported as
Digital Rhetorics: literacies and technologies in education—current practices and future directions
(Lankshear et al., 1997), the project was jointly led by Colin Lankshear and Chris Bigum;
other researchers on the team were Ilana Snyder, Bill Green, Cal Durrant, Eileen
Honan, Wendy Morgan, Joy Murray and Martyn Wild. The Digital Rhetorics project is
cited as ‘a stimulus and resource’ for Teachers and Techno-literacies and it clearly builds on
that report.
In the space available I am unable to do justice to Teachers and Techno-literacies as a
whole. The book comprises six chapters. Chapter 1 provides portraits of three schools.
These portraits are used to identify issues and themes related to managing literacy,
technology and learning in schools, which are in turn developed and enlarged through-
out the chapters that follow. I have found this chapter a useful introductory reading in
professional development courses for teachers new to this field precisely because the
contrastive portraits are grounded in the realities of school life and they vividly
foreground some of the complex philosophical and practical challenges posed by the
perceived imperative to integrate ICT into the curriculum. The questions posed in
Chapter 1 remain as relevant today as when they were written:
• How may literacy teachers learn to use new technologies effectively in their pro-
fessional work?
• What pedagogical models exist that take literacy and technology into account in ways
on which teachers can build for classroom use?
• How are literacy and technology related, and how can literacy teachers make sense of
this relationship to build sound pedagogy? …
• What sorts of principles exist for guiding the integration of new technologies into
classroom learning?
• What methods count as sound uses of new technologies in classroom-based literacy
education? (p. 3)
Chapter 2 aims to integrate the three constructs of literacy, technology and learning.
This is the most theoretical chapter of the book and, because it bears close reading and
discussion with colleagues and pre- and in-service teacher education students, I devote
significant space to it below. Chapter 3 provides a short overview of what educational
policy is and does, and explores ‘the policy roles that teachers need to play in their
professional lives’ (p. xx). This chapter is a useful historical document in its focus on
national and state-level policy documents that apply directly to the interface between
technology, literacy and learning. Chapter 4 draws on site studies conducted in the Digital
Rhetorics project and complements and expands on the three school portraits in Chapter
1. The authors use classroom portraits from five schools to ‘provide an information base
from which to develop ideas, strategies and plans for building on existing strengths and
addressing current shortcomings in pedagogy, policy and professional understanding at
the literacy–technology interface’ (p. xx). Chapter 5 draws out a framework of patterns
and principles for thinking about the findings of the site studies. Subsequent research into
literacy and ICT in other schools (e.g. Comber & Green, 1999; Nixon & Kerin, 2001)
suggests that the five patterns of classroom practice discussed here—complexity, fragility,
discontinuity, conservation and limited authenticity—are still very much in evidence.
The five principles for the effective integration of ICT into classroom-based literacy
education classroom practice—teachers first, complementarity, workability, equity and
focus on trajectories—remain pertinent, and literacy educators need more accounts of
these principles being adopted in educational sites. Chapter 6 translates this framework
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Digital Technologies 265
of patterns and principles into suggestions and guidelines designed to assist policy makers,
literacy educators in universities, school leaders and individual teachers to plan and
programme in order to address the many challenges explored in earlier chapters.
Given the prior histories of collaboration between the authors, it is not surprising that
Teachers and Techno-literacies and Silicon Literacies proceed from a similar theoretical
position—that literacy is a social practice (Street, 1984). From this perspective, ‘emerging
technology-mediated literacy practices … can be understood only when they are con-
sidered within their social, political, economic, cultural and historical contexts’ (Snyder,
2002, p. 5). This argument is most fully developed in the second chapter of Teachers and
Techno-literacies, which is titled ‘Understanding the changing world of literacy, technology
and learning’. The authors quite rightly claim that this chapter offers some ideas that
‘will be useful to literacy teachers in this challenging and changing context’ (p. 23). Many
of these ideas, first published in Digital Rhetorics in 1997, remain productive and
provocative at the time of writing in 2003. These include the ideas that literacy is
increasingly having technology added to it; that new information and communications
technologies (ICT) provide new ways of ‘doing’ literacy; that different contexts of social
practice ‘embed’ different forms of literacy; and that what literacy means is always
changing along with ‘new modes of human practice and ways of experiencing the world’
(p. 26).
Chapter 2 of Teacher and Techno-literacies also includes an elaborated discussion of what
has come to be known as the 3D model of literacy (Green, 1988; Durrant & Green,
2000; Lankshear et al., 1997). The 3D model considers literacy to be an ensemble of
social practices that involves three dimensions—operational, cultural and critical—which
overlap, intersect and are interdependent. This model was influenced by Green’s (1988)
research into the relationships between literacy and subject or content-area learning and
was subsequently developed in response to the increasing ‘technologisation’ of literacy
(Bigum & Green, 1993; Durrant & Green, 2000). In more recent discussions, Green uses
the shorthand device of emphasizing the ‘IT’ in the word ‘l(IT)eracy’ to symbolize the
bringing together theoretically of literacy and IT within this model. The operational
dimension of l(IT)eracy learning includes how to make the computer work from the
basics of turning on to searching databases or operating a CD ROM. The cultural
dimension includes understanding that we use texts and technologies in particular
contexts to make meaning and to do things in the world. The critical dimension of
l(IT)eracy learning includes being able to assess and critique software and other
resources, and to appropriate or redesign them for particular purposes. This model
emphasises that literacy learning is done as people participate in the social and cultural
practices of making meaning for real purposes, and that textual and communicative work
is always done in actual communities and institutions and has real effects. It foregrounds
the socially constructed nature of any ‘literacy’ into which people become socialised, and
emphasises the potential for a literacy to be acted on and transformed. The 3D model
of literacy thus provides a timely corrective in this era of narrow conceptions of literacy
and so-called literacy ‘standards’, and reminds educators of the importance of adopting
a socially critical stance as consumers and users of computers.
The final sections of Chapter 2 in Teachers and Techno-literacies provide support for
educators wanting to adopt a critical stance towards new technologies. Bigum and
Green’s (1995) resource-context model of new technologies is brought together with
Pacey’s (1983) notion of technology practice, and Sproull and Kiesler’s (1991) idea of
‘first and second level effects’ of new technologies, to argue the need for a close
examination of the ‘feedback loop’ that exists between the claims made for the new
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266 H. Nixon
technologies and the resultant changes in their settings or contexts of use. The authors
provide a logical explanation for why computers get ‘schooled’, or ‘made into things that
support and sustain the technology that is the school’ (p. 37). Chapters 1 and 4 of the
book, which provide snapshots of school and classroom practice, illustrate this process at
work, showing how computers become ‘schooled’ as many teachers attempt to conduct
‘business as usual’. However, they also suggest what it might look like for educators to
adopt a socially critical approach to the introduction of ICT into daily workplace
practice.
Chapter 2 of this book also challenges teachers to think critically about the literacy–
technology interface by arguing the necessity for rethinking established ways of associat-
ing literacy and text. The questions posed here remain pressing for literacy theorists and
educators alike:
Is ‘the text metaphor’ (Morgan, 1996) adequate or even appropriate for
understanding multimedia practices, information flows, or meaning-making
practices in general within a dramatically mutating ‘semiotic landscape’
(Kress, 1995, p. 25)? Does text encompass image? Sound? Multimodality?
Non-linearity (Snyder, 1996)? (p. 38)
The argument is made that the shift from print technology to computing and digital
technology problematises a number of former assumptions about the specificity of a text,
including its boundedness in time and space:
With the emergence of database technology, hypertext and hypermedia, we
can now ask: Where is the text? Indeed, more radically and unusually, we can
ask: When is the text? Also: What is the text? Which is the text and which is
context? (p. 38)
Finally, the authors argue that another key problem for literacy education is the
traditional view that texts encompass or subsume information. In a society that increas-
ingly privileges information, there is ‘a need for us to view literacy as involving, even
requiring, the integration of text and information’ (p. 39). As the authors point out, ‘the
new privileged status of information confronts head-on the liberal-humanist tradition of
literacy theory and pedagogy’ (p. 39) which has as its objective the encouragement of
children to experience and create their own imaginative worlds through reading and
writing. In an attempt to assist readers to consider the possible implications of thinking
together literacy and computing, the authors suggest that various types of literacy/
computing might be classified according to whether they are text based, information
based, programming based or games based. Although this is an interesting idea, it
remains to be seen how useful such schemata might be for the field of literacy education.
Taken as a whole, Chapter 2 is immensely thought provoking and I continue to find its
speculations and provocations challenging in my own research and in professional
development contexts when I work with teachers inquiring into the literacy–technology
interface.
Since the mid-1990s, Ilana Snyder’s contribution to the literacy–technology debates
has been significant, beginning with the publication of Hypertext: the electronic labyrinth
(1996), followed by the edited collection Page to Screen: taking literacy into the electronic era
(1997), co-authorship of the Digital Rhetorics report (Lankshear et al., 1997) and the
subsequent Teachers and Techno-literacies, and now Silicon Literacies: communication, innovation
and education in the electronic age.
Unlike Teachers and Techno-literacies, Silicon Literacies is an edited collection of essays on
literacy and technology. It builds on the work begun in Page to Screen (Snyder, 1997), and
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Digital Technologies 267
includes contributions by some of the same authors (Catherine Beavis, Nicholas Bur-
bules, Jane Yellowlees-Douglas, Michael Joyce, Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear).
For the title of this collection, Snyder coins the term ‘silicon literacies’ to describe the
ways that meanings are made within the new communication systems of multimodal
hypertext. In her introduction and conclusion, Snyder makes the argument that a
complex interplay of three constructs—the new communication order, the new political
order and the new work order—shapes and circumscribes the lives, identities and
possibilities of contemporary students. Silicon Literacies takes as its particular focus the new
communication order centred around ICT. The range of authors in this collection
illustrates Snyder’s contention that the field of literacy and technology studies is
essentially an interdisciplinary endeavour. However, the challenge for contributors to the
collection was to find ways to provoke readers to consider what the use of these new
technologies means for educational practices.
Silicon Literacies is organised in two parts. Part 1 (‘Online literacy and rhetorical
practices’) ‘looks at the emergence of new types of text, new language practices, and new
social formations as people find different ways of communicating with each other’ (p. 5).
Part 2 (‘Teaching, learning, technology and innovation’) ‘looks at the possibilities for
creative changes to pedagogical and institutional practices when ICTs are used’ (p. 8).
The diversity of topics addressed in the collection is testimony to the way that the
widespread take-up of ICTs is changing how culturally significant information is coded
and forcing university- and school-based educators to rethink their fundamental goals,
values and pedagogical approaches.
Part 1 informs readers about some of the changing ‘cultural’ dimensions to literacy–
technology practice. In the opening chapter, Knobel and Lankshear document some of
the new literacy practices engendered by the internet. Focusing on the community
ratings feedback system on eBay, they explore the idea of cyberspace as a new socialising
space, and discuss ‘the social issues and responsibilities such new practices may evoke’
(p. 15). Their discussion reminds educators that widespread use of the internet is likely
to produce many new issues of relevance not only to literacy education, but also to moral
and civic education.
In Chapter 2, Chris Abbott argues that users of the world wide web—many of them
young people—are developing changing representational resources, and he calls for more
ethnographies of how different groups develop and use these resources. The main focus
of the chapter is on the potential for the availability of symbols through ICTs to extend
opportunities for students with special needs. In Chapter 3, Catherine Beavis also reports
on the widespread use of ICTs by young people, though her focus is on computer games.
She explores the potential for new kinds of narrative and multimodal communicative
practice associated with computer games to inform the English/literacy curriculum. Both
authors remind the reader that ‘it is one of the paradoxes of what is often referred to as
the digital divide that many of those people who have most to gain from such
technologies are often those least able to get access to them’ (Abbott, p. 39).
The remaining three chapters in Part 1 of Silicon Literacies focus more specifically
on the language and rhetorics of the internet. In ‘Languages.com: the internet and
linguistic pluralism’, Mark Warschauer explores the paradox that although the internet
has English as its ‘global’ language, members of Indigenous and minority groups make
use of the internet to try to preserve and revitalise endangered languages. Further, the
internet has seen in Egypt the rise of new forms of colloquial Arabic and in Singapore
the rise of ‘Singlish’. Thus the complex relations that exist in a globalised cultural
economy between global networks and local identities are having complex effects in
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268 H. Nixon
relation to language and literacy practice. In relation to education, Warschauer supports
the call for a pedagogy of multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; New London Group,
1996), which he argues is required to address two key forms of plurality in contemporary
conditions—a plurality of media, and a plurality of dialects and languages. Educators
need to encourage ‘reading, writing and communication in diverse media, genres,
dialects and languages’ (p. 72).
In the final two chapters in Part 1, Nicholas Burbules and Michael Joyce explore the
rhetorics of the web. Joyce’s chapter is both a dissertation on, and brilliant performance
of, post-hypertextual rhetorics, which needs to be read first hand. In ‘The web as a
rhetorical place’, Burbules develops arguments about the characteristics of hyperlinks
begun elsewhere, including in Page to Screen. He surveys five key characteristics of
hyperlinks to suggest ‘some of the ways in which their semantic possibilities are limited
by their navigational features’ (p. 77): they are bi-directional, but their relation is not
symmetrical; hyperlinks are one-to-one links, and this binary form may have a limited
capacity to represent the complexity of meanings that are multiple, multi-layered and
semantically complex; hyperlinks are static; they are author driven, operate almost
instantaneously and tend to be invisible as moments in themselves; and hyperlinks and
their contents can be represented in different ways. An argument is made for the
importance of critically hyper-reading ‘not only for avoiding manipulation … but also for
forging more dynamic and creative understandings of the material at hand’ (p. 77). The
second part of the chapter argues that the web is a rhetorical place rather than space and
suggests that this opens up several educational opportunities. These include building
more dynamic, open and productive hyperlinked structures; the opportunity to find and
imagine within apparently binary links ‘moments of complexity and even paradox’
(p. 83); and ‘to conceive of learning in the context of the web as the achievement of a
certain kind of mobility’—a capacity to move from place to place, but also to create new
places, in ‘a kind of learning that goes beyond registering information to forming the
capacities of interpreting, evaluating and adding to what is found’ (p. 83). This dense and
closely argued chapter rewards re-reading and will, I am sure, productively inform many
readers’ future teaching of critical approaches to reading the web.
Part 2 of Silicon Literacies comprises five chapters that explore aspects of teaching,
learning, technology and innovation. Jane Yellowless-Douglas and George P. Landow
provide US-based case studies of internet innovations at the University of Florida and
Brown University, respectively. Landow traces the history of the development and
application of hypertext systems in education, scholarship and the creative arts at Brown
University and draws from it general conclusions about initiating and supporting
innovation within universities. He concludes that the conditions that stimulate innovation
are not the same as those that nurture it; that innovations still often come as a surprise;
that changed attitudes are frequently more important than the original innovation; that
organisations that wish to promote innovation must have someone to track and evaluate
innovations; and ‘someone in a position of major authority who must understand both
the nature of the technology and at least some of the potential effects upon the institution
in regards to teaching, learning, scholarship, intellectual property, publication, institu-
tional structures, and the like’ (p. 114). The chapter by Yellowlees-Douglas recounts
lessons learned from students who undertook a writing-intensive internet-only Master of
Business Administration. Her discussion of the successful features of online teaching
environments emphasises the value for students of discussion, attention and feedback,
and provides useful guidelines for incorporating team assignments, class meetings, and
peer critique and evaluations into online pedagogies. One of her conclusions is that
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Digital Technologies 269
online courses provide valuable impetus for faculty members to try new methods of
teaching.
In the final three chapters of Part 2, Chris Bigum, Ron Burnett and Douglas Kellner
each suggest ways in which teachers might become what Snyder calls in her conclusion
‘agents of a new educational imagination’ (p. 179) in ‘an increasingly mediated world in
which communication, culture and learning intersect on a daily basis’ (Burnett, p. 152).
In ‘Technology, learning and visual culture’, Burnett emphasises the need for ‘interdisci-
plinary debate on the role of literacy, not only at a pedagogical level, but also as a
broad-based cultural activity’ (p. 141). In particular, he suggests a need for the disciplines
of education and communication to establish more explicit connections with a view to
exploring the interconnected discourses of learning and communications. He argues for
a ‘far more integrative and holistic approach to pedagogy’ (p. 144), and provides a
number of guidelines that may ‘both form and inform the development of pedagogical
strategies in literacy education’ (p. 144). Burnett shares with Kellner a belief in the
importance of taking seriously the cultures in which our students participate and goes so
far as to inquire, ‘Why do students have to learn from people who may have very little
respect for the cultural context in which students live?’ (p. 142). Burnett notes that visual
cultures—of which the web is both a part and a foundation—are very complex, adding
that it is nonetheless urgent that we develop creative tools with which to critique them.
Focussing more broadly on media culture, Kellner makes a similar argument. In his
view, ICTs and new media both require and make possible a critical reconstruction of
education. The objective is that students learn to analyse media culture ‘as products of
social production and struggle’ (p. 159), and learn to be critical of media representations
and discourses, but also learn to use the media as modes of self-expression and social
activism.
In ‘Design sensibilities, schools and the new computing and communication technolo-
gies (CCT)’, Chris Bigum argues for a fundamental rethink about the roles that schools
can play in the new communication order. In doing so he revisits some of the issues
explored in Teachers and Techno-literacies. For example, the latter posed the following
question:
At what point does the value and benefit of ‘offering students opportunities to
work with new technology applications’ become outweighed by the risks of
apprenticing them to less than optimal versions of social practice? (p. 97)
Bigum expresses a similar concern, noting that within school-based education
There is little consideration of the possibility that existing teaching, learning,
curriculum or assessment practices may not be appropriate for a world outside
schools, increasingly shaped by the use of CCTS. (p. 133)
Bigum draws on the concept of design sensibilities (Schrage, 1998) to explore the
limitations and possibilities of certain ways of framing CCTs in classrooms and schools.
For example, he argues that a design sensibility based on information delivery is limited
at the outset because, traditionally, schools are information consumers rather than
producers. In contrast, Bigum explores the potential of a design sensibility that empha-
sises the impact that digital technologies are having, and will continue to have, on the
relationships between people and between people and organisations. Thinking about ICT
in schools in terms of relationships
shifts the focus from the technology per se and problems of how best to integrate
CCTs into the curriculum towards schools as social organisations, their internal
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270 H. Nixon
relationships and those with the local community, government and other
schools. In effect, the focus shifts from the question, ‘What on earth do we do
with this new technology?’ to ‘What kinds of relationships do we want to have
with the world beyond our boundaries?’ (p. 136).
The chapter concludes with what Bigum describes as a preliminary account of the early
exploration by schools of ideas about how they might operate as and within communities
that are in the business of developing knowledge and expertise about themselves. This is
a very challenging concept because it requires schools ‘to move from the relatively safe,
“pretend” space of conventional curriculum to doing work that is judged by external
groups as useful and valuable’ (p. 137). This is precisely the kind of shift and design
sensibility advocated, but rarely found in schools, by the authors of Teachers and
Techno-literacies. Bigum is quick to point out that this avenue of development in schools
is exploratory. Nonetheless, the school he describes is taking steps to ensure that the
school can more fully engage with local community needs and interests. Students and
staff now employ digital and video cameras to do their work, the end result of which is
student production of knowledge products that are directed at audiences beyond the
school. Bigum sketches the potential for schools to become systematic researchers about
things that matter to their communities, with the potential—if this work is taken
seriously—for schools to form new kinds of relationships with the local community, and
thus to take on new roles as knowledge producers within the new communication order.
However, he does not underestimate potential difficulties of achieving such outcomes,
not the least of which is the task of remaking schools in the eyes of the community.
Both Teachers and Techno-literacies and Silicon Literacies make important and challenging
contributions to the field of literacy–technology studies. Each book provokes anew
important questions that bear repeating. Neither book is afraid to confront some of the
more complex issues that accompany the move to integrate computers into the curricu-
lum. Neither book shies away from politically unpopular views. They emphasise, for
example, the resource-intensive and demanding nature of online education and the fact
that educators and researchers are still not fully literate in the use of computers, and they
note the enduring educational and social issues to do with fair and reasonable forms of
access and equity that accompany the widespread take-up of ICTs. Finally, both books
argue that for literacy teaching and learning to be embedded in contexts of practice that
are meaningful to students, education will need to take very seriously many forms of
practice that have been considered ‘non-conventional’ for education. These include
‘elements of youth culture, leisure and recreation pursuits, as well as practices associated
with life in the home where young people interact with a range of “mature” uses of
technologies and information with friends or by observing and interacting with older
siblings and adults’ (Lankshear & Snyder with Green, p. 153). In short, if literacy
education is to enter a new era in response to changing literacies associated with digital
technologies, the field needs more books like these.
Correspondence: Helen Nixon, Centre for Studies in Literacy, Policy and Learning Cultures,
University of South Australia, Holbrooks Road, Underdale, South Australia 5032,
Australia. Email: [email protected]
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