Beyond Technology for Technology’s Sake: Advancing Multiliteracies in the Twenty-First Century

Beyond Technology for Technology’s Sake: Advancing Multiliteracies in the Twenty-First

Century

CARLIN BORSHEIM, KELLY MERRITT, and DAWN REED

Abstract:

Teachers who apply these technologies in their classrooms do more than motivate students with the latest cool tool; they prepare students with multiliteracies and for the realities of the technological world. Therefore, teachers must go beyond implementing technology for

technology’s sake to consider the evolving nature of texts and the literacy skills associated with consuming and producing those texts. In this article, the authors share specific technologies they have used in English and English education classrooms and offer examples for adapting teaching to the impact of technology, rather than adapting technology to teaching.

multiliteracies, a term that originated with the New London Group (Cope and Kalantzis

2000), is based on the well-established assumption that technologies (including computers, cell phones, PDAs, the Internet, and Web 2.0 applications such as wikis, blogs, and other social networking sites) have impacted the nature of texts, as well as the ways people use and interact with texts.

Anstey and Bull’s definition (2006) of a multiliterate person as one who “is flexible and strategic and can understand and use literacy and literate practices with a range of texts and technologies; in socially responsible ways; in a socially, culturally, and linguistically diverse world; and to fully participate in life as an active and informed citizen” (55).

First, a multiliteracies pedagogy facilitates a constructivist model of learning in which students can make meaning through authentic experiences. Second, a multiliteracies pedagogy can support traditional curriculum objectives, like reading challenging texts or engaging in various aspects of the writing process.

The proliferation of online resources meant that students needed new and explicit strategies for locating, sorting, gathering, evaluating, and reading articles from online databases and Web sites. As students began to identify and gather credible sources, we put away the 3 × 5 note cards and

experimented with using Word documents, wikis, andsocial bookmarking sites to organize information and take notes.

In the next phase, students used traditional wordprocessing applications to compose and revise their formal research papers, and I found the comment feature in Word to be an invaluable tool for commenting on students’ rough drafts, as well as for persuading students to be specific in their feedback on one another’s work. In a final and important step, I asked students to adapt their traditional research paper into a media genre appropriate for reaching an audience outside the classroom.

The multiliteracies approach helps students learn to be savvier users and organizers of online resources, use technologies to facilitate revision and collaboration throughout the writing process, and use technologies to achieve authentic goals and reach real audiences for

their research.

When I keep the objectives in the forefront, my students do as well; therefore, they do not get carried away with the technology we use to compliment the writing.