Emily+for+Oct.+30th

__ From Larson & Marsh: __ “The role of new technologies in classrooms is not at all to preserve familiar practices and routines or even to ‘add’ new technologies to them. Rather, it is to radically reconfigure //what// is to be learned and //how// it is to be learned, including the role and place of new technologies themselves within such learning.” (p. 93) __ From Lankshear & Knobel: __ “This spirit of an architectural politics designed to encourage participation has been taking up on a scale unimaginable less than a decade ago.” (p. 85) __ From Kress: __ “That is the contrast in affordance of the two modes: in writing, relatively vacuous elements in strict order (in speech also, to a somewhat lesser extent); and full elements in a (relatively) open order in image.” (p. 4) __ From Gutierrez and Larson: __ “When you look at the history of participation in the activities, you begin to see who had, or did not have, access to that participation, who got to define what counted as participation and who didn’t.” (p. 72) One of the main themes that I noticed throughout the readings was the notion of “new literacies” and their construction. There was a major emphasis on the social construction and collaboration that is being increasingly seen in new texts that are generated via blogs, wikis, and other modes of public communication. As Gutierrez and Larson argued, historically, participation in the creation of texts and the powers associated with that creation were restricted to a select few. Now, anyone can be an author of numerous kinds of texts. Also, there has been a shift in what these texts will include. The transition to the use of images rather than alphabetic writing also changes how texts will be read and who will read them (Kress, 2003). Remixes of video segments that are then synched to music to create entirely new music videos is an example of the ability of images and their meanings to be read and interpreted in a variety of ways. This concept holds true for many collaborative sites with Wikipedia being one of the largest examples. The ability of participants to add, edit or change information allows for widespread authorship and social construction of knowledge and ideas. 1) What are some ways in which teachers can create expanded spaces for learning that eliminates or diminishes the dichotomy of in/out of school environments?   2)  What are some techniques that can be used to bring collaborative writing and construction of texts into the classroom? 3) How has a change in authorship created a shift in the power of information and how it's interpreted?
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