The Bard and the Web

In a multiliterate age we are teaching through technology, even in erstwhile conservative subjects such as English. Once teacher preparation involved only print based texts which preservice teachers read. English has always occupied the territory of the printed word, but is there room for technology in the study of the bard? Multiliteracies involve the mastery of a repertoire of literacy practices, including those deploying technology. This chapter describes a research project, which explores the challenges and concerns preservice teachers face when teaching complex literature such as Shakespeare. The chapter describes and evaluates the effectiveness of preservice students’ interactions with a set of digital vodcasts featuring an ‘expert teacher’ teaching Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This is an exploratory study deploying mostly qualitative analysis of survey data and focus group discussions with preservice teachers in their final year of undergraduate study at an Australian university. The use of vodcast resources allowed preservice teachers to effectively access ‘expert performance,’ to critically problem-solve specific issues around teaching Shakespeare, detailed in the project’s design. In deploying this technology, the preservice teachers effectively engage in a ‘cognitive apprenticeship’ through a repertoire of literacy practices on their way to becoming reflective practitioners.

Learning from Computer Games

This chapter builds on James Gee’s (2003) description of the playing of computer games as the learning of a new literacy. To investigate this form of literacy learning from a player’s perspective, the author created an avatar and joined the online community of the Massively Multiplayer Online Game, the World of WarcraftTM produced by Blizzard Entertainment®. This autoethnographic approach to exploring the game’s linguistic, visual, audio, spatial and gestural elements of design provide an insider’s perspective of the meaning-making resources that were on offer. The chapter concludes with a tentative consideration of how understandings about the literacies used within a virtual world might inform the learning of literacies in schools and other educational institutions.

Multimedia, Oral History, and Teacher Education

The study took place at a Catholic PreK-8 school/parish where two faculty instructors taught undergraduate methods courses. At the parish site, the pre-service teachers worked with elementary students to create a range of multi-media projects. These projects showcased the oral histories of the people, places, and events of the school and church community and allowed the pre-service teachers to integrate technology into their teaching. The researchers analyzed observational, interview, and textual data and found a range of behaviors that reflected the pre-service teachers’ familiarity/unfamiliarity with technology, teaching, and the community in which they were learning. As a result, their attempts at learning through and teaching with technology, along with our attempts to teach with and learn through technology, revealed a multiplicity of enactments of fast literacies (Schneider, King, Kozdras, Minick, & Welsh, 2006). In this chapter, we share examples from the themes of our analysis, which reflect Kinzer’s (2005) notion of the “intersection” between school, community, and technology.

Developing Literate Practices in Design and Technology Education

This chapter reports on research that details the emerging literacy demands faced by both the teachers, and the students who are participating in Design and Technology education within secondary schools across Victoria, Australia. The processes of design are at the centre of the curriculum for Design and Technology education and they are the main content focus of both the teacher’s work of developing curriculum and teaching, and for the learner’s engagement. In this chapter the field of Design and Technology education is presented and discussed as a site where communication, interpretation and articulation of learning and understanding are inexplicably bound up with texts and literacies. In order to ground the discussion in the specifics of an authentic program, the curriculum and pedagogical practices associated with the current Year 12 Design and Technology program are analysed to illustrate the development and use, (production and consumption) of texts, particularly multimodal texts, within new, emerging and multi-literacies. In this way the chapter acknowledges the significance of literacy development across the school curriculum. This chapter also takes up a point made by Unsworth (2001) that literacy as a social practice takes up numerous and different forms in the various fields across the curriculum, therefore this research analyses explicitly what the development of literate practices specifically look like in the field of Design and Technology education.

Designs of Meaning

This chapter focuses on Colleen, one of 22 youths who took part in a two year qualitative study designed to explore young adolescents’ use of information communication technology (ICT) and popular media texts to make sense of themselves and their world. The rationale for the study stemmed from limited research concerning the overlaps and schisms between adolescents’ use of ICT and popular media texts in their everyday lives (home, community, peer group) and how adolescents’ engagement with ICT and popular media texts affects established social institutions. The New London Group’s (1996) conception of multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000) and an activity theory-influenced framework (Beach, 2000; Cole, 1996; Engestrom & Miettinen, 1999) were used to guide the study. Colleen’s use of ICT and popular media texts, both in and outside of school, illustrates the non-linear, non-hierarchical complexity of the pedagogy of multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000).

An Overview of Technology in Society

Being literate is vital for learning and working, possibly more so in the digital age than in the industrial age, given society’s reliance on digital technologies. Individual and societal reliance on technology has in turn created problems and opportunities. The associated problems concern who has access to what forms of technology and when and how it is used. The opportunities centre on the interconnectedness of digital technologies, which ultimately transform how and when we communicate. When technology and communication are joined together they form another literacy commonly referred to as technoliteracy. This chapter will provide a brief overview of some of the ways in which literacy and technology interconnect and will provide the reader with sufficient understanding of the field to enable them to grasp some of the more theoretical and practical applications of technoliteracy discussed in the following chapters.

A Snapshot View of how Senior Visual Arts Students Encounter and Engage with Technology in Their Arts Practice

This chapter reports the findings of a pilot research project that investigated how senior visual arts students engage with and utilise technology in the creation of art works during their program of study. During the course of a year, six students from two schools were interviewed and their work was visually documented to ascertain whether technology played a predominant part in their practice. Analysis of the interview data was framed within a social constructivist perspective and drew on notions of skills and expertise, support, access, awareness and inspiration. The findings revealed that the senior visual arts students regularly used technology as part of their process but often reverted to using traditional media with some technological aspects in the creation of their final work.

ICT in Malay Language Learning

With digital communications and technological media becoming an integral part of the new professional workplace and everyday lives of the younger generation (especially in post-industrial societies), comes the clarion call for educators to develop a more complex understanding of language and literacy and how to go about designing pedagogies that equip students with 21st Century skills. This chapter presents two case studies that examine the complex interaction of teachers, students, writing pedagogies, language curriculum and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). The study explored students’ experiences of using ICT in second language writing and the impact of ICT on writing pedagogy and the curriculum, producing in-depth descriptions and interpretations to answer a set of focused research questions.

CALL Course Design for Second Language Learning

The study presented in this chapter investigated the impact of computers and the Internet on both the achievement of learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) and their attitudes toward learning EFL. The field study took place at a University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where first year students study English 101, a compulsory English language course. Thirty students were randomly selected to study in an alternative EFL course using computers, the Internet and collaborative activities within a constructivist framework. Another group of 38 students was also randomly selected to be the control group. These students attended English 101 taught using traditional teaching aids and the grammar-translation teaching method. The study was 13 weeks long. The findings of the study indicate a strong positive shift in the subjects’ attitude and motivation toward learning EFL after using the new technology-based approach. As to the subjects’ language achievement, the treatment group outperformed the control group by 30%. These findings provide strong support for the effectiveness of a technology-enhanced learning environment for second language teaching and learning.

Unpacking Social Inequalities

This chapter is based on a comparative, qualitative study that explored social equity issues related to technology integration among middle schools located in the United States of America. Differences between economically privileged and economically disadvantaged school districts were explored to determine if inequalities related to technology integration generally, and the development of multiliteracies specifically, exist. Participants included middle school students from grades 5 to 8, and teachers and administrators from nine schools located in four different school districts. Data included transcripts from interviews and focus groups, observational field notes, and various school artifacts collected from the research sites. Using these data, an exploration of the contextual factors that might influence the inclusion of instruction for new literacies directly related to literacy activities on the Internet was conducted. The results suggest that a disparity does exist along economic lines and several contextual factors were identified that may impede the development of the new literacies including the use of the Internet as an information resource among middle school students in the United States.