Literacy is usually defined as the ability to read and write, or the ability to use language to read, write, listen, and speak.

There is no such thing as “illiterate”, there are just certain things in life that people are more or less literate about.

Literacy is the ability to be able to be aware and cognizant of the task you are doing or the situation you are in. Being literate is the ability to critically analyze texts and interpret them to have meaning.

Research inlanguage development has traditionally emphasizedthelinguistic attainmentsof young children, and it continuesto do so

Having thiscapacity,however,doesnotalwaysguaranteeitsuse (Sefman, Beardslee, Schultz, Krupa,&Podorefsky1986). For example,although mature individualsmayknowthat itisrudetointerruptanother speaker whoisstrugglingtoexpress anidea,they maynonethelessdosoduringapassionate debate or discussion.

lexicon

every subject area teacher is responsible for further developing, strengthening and enhancing literacy.

. Language is explained as a socially and culturally constructed system of communication.

traditionally been thought of as reading and writing

Emotional distress causes increased heart rate, muscle tensing, faster breathing, and inability to focus on other subjects.

NAAL defines literacy as both task-based and skills-based.

NAAL defines literacy as both task-based and skills-based

Read: Search, Navigate, Synthesize, Evaluate Example - Learners are problem-solving when they are able to use the web to search and critically evaluate information to synthesize findings that support a researched opinion.

Examining and understanding the consequences of sharing data online.

Understanding the needs of audiences in order to make relevant contributions to a community.

Knowing how to read, write, and participate in the digital world has become the 4th basic foundational skill next to the three Rs—reading, writing, and arithmetic—in a rapidly evolving, networked world.

Audience & Cultural Awareness Engaging in behaviors and actions that show an awareness of and sensitivity to stereotyping and cultural bias. Using language that is appropriate to the purpose of the interaction and audience. Differentiating between appropriate and inappropriate behavior and actions to the purpose of the interaction and audience. Conflict Resolution Redirecting focus toward common ground and the task at hand. Engaging with conflict in a way that strengthens overall coherence. Negotiating shared understandings during conflict. Use of Collaboration Technology Participating in selection and utilization of technology tools that enhance group productivity. Following norms and conventions of communicating in online forums. Demonstrating an understanding of the way technology impacts one’s own and others work or views.

21C Skills emerge as skills critical to success in today’s world.

Understanding the needs of audiences in order to make relevant contributions to a community.

Comparing and contrasting information from a number of sources. Making judgments about the “usefulness” or relevance of a web source based on the content presented. Making judgments about the “truthfulness” or credibility of a web source based on the content presented. Identifying and investigating the author or publisher of web resources. Evaluating how purpose and perspectives shape web resources.

identify a set of core web literacy skills, and set the stage for engaging individuals as makers on the web.

Knowing how to read, write, and participate in the digital world has become the 4th basic foundational skill next to the three Rs

reach and meet the growing number of diverse audiences using the web.

Participating on the open web includes connecting with the communities that share, build, and sustain meaningful content online. A healthy online community requires knowledge of how to create, publish and link content, and an understanding of security in order to keep content, identity, and systems safe. 3 Participating on the web allows users to remix, modify, and share content, and the skills and competencies in this strand drive the open web.

What leadership skills are being developed as a result?

Does one need to code in order to be considered web literate?

Combined with 21C leadership Skills (i.e. critical thinking, collaboration, problem solving, creativity, communication), these digital-age skills help us live and work in today’s world

In order to accomplish this, we need to provide people with open access to the skills and know-how needed to use the web to improve their lives, careers, and organizations.

Understanding and respecting community behaviors when expressing opinions in online discussions.

Arranging digital content visually to provide audience with cues for organization of the content.

Examples of these skills include collaboration, communication, creativity, and problem-solving.

Having these skills on the web expands access and opportunity for more people to learn anytime, anywhere, at any pace.

To help people become good citizens of the web,

Although Wikipedia is not a scholarly source, it is usually a good enough first stop to learn about something. However, students need to know how it is updated.

do we remind them of the risks of placing their information online and give them choices of how much personal information to reveal?

Doug Belshaw’s eight elements of digital literacies, I have just mentioned the civic, critical, creative, and communicative. The other four are cultural, cognitive, constructive, and confidence.

For example, teaching digital skills would include showing students how to download images from the Internet and insert them into PowerPoint slides or webpages. Digital literacy would focus on helping students choose appropriate images, recognize copyright licensing, and cite or get permissions, in addition to reminding students to use alternative text for images to support those with visual disabilities.

Do our students recognize the ways in which Facebook’s privacy settings continually shift without user permission,

When is it best to do a Google search versus ask a question on Twitter? Why would students tweet to a particular hashtag or person versus another? When they tweet to people from another country in another time zone, what kind of context do they need to consider? What should they add, remove, or modify in order to communicate better?

Digital literacy would focus on helping students choose appropriate images, recognize copyright licensing, and cite or get permissions, in addition to reminding students to use alternative text for images to support those with visual disabilities.

, I avoid putting my students in high-risk situations, but this does not mean avoiding teaching digital literacy.

Digital skills would focus on which tool to use (e.g., Twitter) and how to use it (e.g., how to tweet, retweet, use TweetDeck), while digital literacy would include in-depth questions: When would you use Twitter instead of a more private forum? Why would you use it for advocacy? Who puts themselves at risk when they do so?

Digital skills focus on what and how. Digital literacy focuses on why, when, who, and for whom

I avoid putting my students in high-risk situations, but this does not mean avoiding teaching digital literacy

For example, teaching digital skills would include showing students how to download images from the Internet and insert them into PowerPoint slides or webpages. Digital literacy would focus on helping students choose appropriate images, recognize copyright licensing, and cite or get permissions, in addition to reminding students to use alternative text for images to support those with visual disabilities.

Yet, as early adopters, history’s first generation of “always connected” individuals do not have the knowledge and skills to critically explore, build, and connect online.

This, too, is false. Indeed, the data from released national tests show conclusively that the students have the most difficulty with those items that require understanding and transfer, not recall or recognition.

Page 5Stage 2—Determine Assessment Evidence Key Questions: How will we know if stu-dents have achieved the desired results? What will we accept as evidence of stu-dent understanding and their ability to use (transfer) their learning in new situations? How will we evaluate student performance in fair and consistent ways?Backward design encourages teachers and curriculum planners to first think like assessors before designing specific units and lessons. The assessment evidence we need reflects the desired results identified in Stage 1. Thus, we consider in advance the assessment evidence needed to document and validate that the targeted learning has been achieved. Doing so invariably sharpens and focuses teaching. In Stage 2, we distinguish between two broad types of assessment—performance tasks and other evidence. The perfor-mance tasks ask students to apply their learning to a new and authentic situation as means of assessing their understand-ing and ability to transfer their learning. In the UbD framework, we have identified six facets of understanding for assessment purposes. When someone truly under-stands, they• Can explain concepts, principles, and processes by putting it their own words, teaching it to others, justifying their answers, and showing their reasoning.• Can interpret by making sense of data, text, and experience through images, analogies, stories, and models.• Can apply by effectively using and adapting what they know in new and complex contexts.• Demonstrate perspective by seeing the big picture and recognizing differ-ent points of view.• Display empathy by perceiving sensitively and walking in someone else’s shoes.• Have self-knowledge by showing meta-cognitive awareness, using productive habits of mind, and reflect-ing on the meaning of the learning and experience.

In what ways do the arts reflect as well as shape culture?

The point of school is not to simply excel in each class, but to be able to use one’s learning in other settings. A

Understanding is revealed when students autonomously make sense of and transfer their learning through authentic performance. Six facets of under-standing—the capacity to explain, interpret, apply, shift perspective, empa-thize, and self-assess—can serve as indicators of understanding.

Each zebra has its own unique pattern of distinctive stripes, just as humans have their own unique pattern of fingerprints.

So we have a couple of options. We can 1) hurl their electronics to the damn moon or 2) begin to implement some new limits. They won’t like the latter but they really wouldn’t like the former—and there are a few things you can do to make the transition a little less painful for everyone involved.

rarely reheat leftover pizza

early acts of literacy were closely tied to power and chiefly used for management practices, and probably less than 1% of the population was literate, as it was confined to a very small ruling elite.

Origins of the alphabet

Lessig (2005) claims that at a very general level all of culture can be understood in terms of remix, where someone creates a cultural product by mixing meaningful elements together (e.g., ideas from different people with ideas of one’s own), and then someone else comes along and remixes this cultural artefact with others to create yet another artefact

associated with activism contesting copyright and intellectual property legislation

Digital Remix: The Art and Craft of Endless HybridizationColin Lankshear and Michele Knobel Keynote presented to the International Reading Association Pre-Conference Institute “Using Technology to Develop and Extend the Boundaries of Literacy”, Toronto, 13 May 2007 IntroductionBy “remix” we mean the practice of taking cultural artefacts and combining and manipulating them into a new kind of creative blend. Until recently this concept was associated almost entirely with recorded music. It referred to using audio editing techniques to produce “an alternative mix of a recorded song that differed from the original, and involved taking apart the various instruments and components that make up a recording and remixing them into something that sounds completely different” (ethnomus.ucr.edu/remix_culture/remix_history.ht

hotoshopping remixes (e.g., Lostfrog.org)•Music and music video remixes (e.g., Danger Mouse’s “Grey Album” and the Grey video)•Machinima remixes (e.g., Machinima.com)•Moving image remixes (e.g., Animemusicvideos.org)•Original manga and anime fan art (e.g., DeviantArt.com)•Television, movie, book remixes (e.g., Fanfiction.net)•Serviceware mashups (e.g., Twittervision.com)

By “remix” we mean the practice of taking cultural artefacts and combining and manipulating them into a new kind of creative blend. Until recently this concept was associated almost entirely with recorded music.

Cultural Anthropologist Mimi Ito on Connected Learning, Children, and Digital Media

Creativity is a remix | Kirby Ferguson

Learners are encouraged to be creative as they build and revise content. They should look to see if it meets their needs and how representative it is to other elements of online information. But, most importantly, they are to use the expertise of other students and the teacher in the classroom. I would also suggest including elements of abstracted replay, or viewing the work of experts as they revise and edit their own work process and produ

Construction is equal parts inspiration and perspiration. Construction calls on creativity as well as persistence, flexibility, and revision. Construction asks our students and teachers to focus on the power and patience employed during work process…and not just the final resultant work product

our understanding of construction and creation needs to be broad enough to allow for change in the future.

The ideas and concepts in all of this work does overlap sometimes…and students and teachers should feel empowered to move in, out, and between all of the concepts. Working online is a fluid experience which calls for flexible learners.

we’ve developed elements of online collaborative inquiry, and online content construction to help expand the work students are involved in as they use online information sources to research and develop media skills.

we’ve developed elements of online collaborative inquiry, and online content construction to help expand the work students are involved in as they use online information sources to research and develop media skills.

The world was changing, the communications environment was changing, and it seemed to us to follow that literacy teaching and learning would to have to change, as well.

The kind of person who can live well in this world is someone who has acquired the capacity to navigate from one domain of social activity to another, who is resilient in their capacity to articulate and enact their own identities and who can find ways of entering into dialogue with and learn new and unfamiliar social languages (Cope and Kalantzis, 1998).

Meanwhile, school was a place which inculcated a rudimentary ‘basics’. Literacy, in fact, was two of the ‘three R’s’: reading, writing and arithmetic. Children memorised spelling lists, and learnt the parts of speech and correct grammar. School was a universe of straightforwardly right and wrong answers, of authoritative texts and authoritarian teachers. The underlying lesson of the basics was about the social order and its sources of authority,

There is no dispute, however, that education provides access to material resources in the form of better paid employment; that it affords an enhanced capacity to participate in civic life; that it promises personal growth.

pplication of knowledge and understandings to the complex diversity of real world situations and testing their validity.

This is a process of making the world anew with fresh and creative forms of action and perception.

‘Analysing Functionally’ includes processes of reasoning, drawing inferential and deductive conclusions, establishing functional relations such as between cause and effect and analysing logical and textual connections. Learners explore causes and effects, develop chains of reasoning and explain patterns in text. And ‘Analysing Critically’ (that is, more critically than functionally) involves evaluation of your own and other people’s perspectives, interests and motives. In these knowledge processes, learners interrogate the interests behind a meaning or an action, and their own processes of thinking

Conceptualising requires that learners be active concept and theory-makers. It also requires weaving between the experiential and the conceptual (Kalantzis and Cope, 2005). This kind of weaving is primarily cognitive, between Vygotsky’s world of everyday or spontaneous knowledge and the world of science or systematic concepts, or between the Piaget’s concrete and abstract thinking (Cazden, 2006a).

Meanings are grounded in real world of patterns of experience, action and subjective interest

Transformed Practice. In applying these ideas to curriculum realities over the past decade, we have reframed these ideas somewhat and translated them into the more immediately recognisable pedagogical acts or ‘knowledge processes’ of ‘Experiencing’, ‘Conceptualising’, ‘Analysing’ and ‘Applying’

Didactic teaching promotes mimesis—the transmission and acquisition of the rules of literacy, for instance. Teaching is a process of transmission. Cultural stability and uniformity are the results. Building by contrast on its notions of design and meaning-as-transformation, a pedagogy of Multiliteracies is characteristically transformative. Transformative curriculum recognises that the process of designing redesigns the designer (Kalantzis, 2006a). Learning is a process of self-re-creation. Cultural dynamism and diversity are the results.

Web-pages today are full of written text, but the logic of their reading is more like the syntax of the visual than that of the written language. Reading the screen requires considerable navigational effort. Today’s screens are designed for many viewing paths, allowing for diverse interests and subjectivities amongst viewers, and the reading path they choose will reflect the considerable design effort viewer has put into their reading.

so a pedagogy which restricts learning to one artificially segregated mode will favour some types of learners over others

Designs of MeaningAvailable Designs:Found and findable resources for meaning: culture, context and purpose-specific patterns and conventions of meaning making.Designing:The act of meaning: work performed on/with Available Designs in representing the world or other’s representations of it, to oneself or others.The Redesigned:The world transformed, in the form of new Available Designs, or the meaning designer who, through the very act of Designing, has transformed themselves(learning).

In the life of the meaning-maker, this process of transformation is the essence of learning. The act of representing to oneself the world and others’ representations of it, transforms the learner themselves.

•Representational: What do the meanings refer to?•Social: How do the meanings connect the persons they involve?•Structural: How are the meanings organised?•Intertextual: How do the meanings fit into the larger world of meaning?•Ideological: Whose interests are the meanings skewed to serve?

including mode (such as linguistic, visual, audio, gestural, tactile and spatial), genre (the shape a text has) and discourse (the shape meaning-making takes in a social institution)

Available Designs (found representational forms); the Designing one does (the work you do when you make meaning, how you appropriate and revoice and transform Available Designs); and The Redesigned (how, through the act of Designing, the world and the person are transformed).

y. Literacy teaching is not about skills and competence; it is aimed a creating a kind of person, an active designer of meaning, with a sensibility open to differences, change and innovation. The logic of Multiliteracies is one which recognises that meaning making is an active, transformative process, and a pedagogy based on that recognition is more likely to open up viable lifecourses for a world of change and diversity.

9interest, affiliation), their identities are multilayered.

Old logics of literacy and teaching are profoundly challenged by this new media environment. There are bound to fall short, not only disappointing young people whose expectations of engagement are greater, but also for failing to direct their energies to the developing the kinds of persons required for the new domains of work, citizenship and personality

We are in the midst of a profound shift in the balance of agency, in which as workers, citizens and persons, we are more and more required to be users, players, creators and discerning consumers rather than the spectators, delegates, audiences or quiescent consumers of an earlier modernity.

The Multiliteracies approach suggests a pedagogy for active citizenship, centred on learners as agents in their own knowledge processes, capable of contributing their own as well as negotiating the differences between one community and the next.

We would argue today that new schooling needs to promote a very different kind of citizenship—an active, bottom-up citizenship in which people can take a self-governing role in the many divergent communities of their lives—the work teams, their professions, their neighbourhoods, their ethnic associations, their environments, their voluntary organisations, their affinity groups

Education is conceived more as a market than a service provided to citizens by a welfare state. In the context of the shrinking the state, its role is being reduced to the most basic of basics—literacy as phonics and numeracy as algorithmic procedures—on the assumption that the market can do the rest for those who can afford the tuition fees and find value for their money.

And even in the heart of the new economy, those who don’t manage to clone to the corporate culture and buy into its feigned egalitarianism, people who find their difference makes them an outsider, however subtlety, find their aspirations to social mobility hitting ‘glass ceilings’. In this case, a pedagogy of Multiliteracies may go one step further, to help create conditions of critical understanding of the discourses of work and power, a kind of knowing from which newer, more productive and genuinely more egalitarian working conditions might emerge

Literacy needs much more than the traditional basics of reading and writing the national language; in the new economy workplace it is a set of supple, variable, communication strategies, ever-diverging according the cultures and social languages of technologies, functional groups, types of organisation and niche clienteles.

Replacing the hierarchical command structures of the old workplace are the horizontal relations of teamwork. Replacing the logic of the division of labour and deskilling is the logic of ‘multiskilling’ or creating the rounded and flexible worker whose skills repertoire is ever-broadening. Replacing mass production of uniform products is customisation of products and services for niche markets, each representing a kind of identity in the commodity space of the new capitalism. Replacing the orders of the boss are ‘flattened hierarchy’ and the supposedly self-motivating dynamics of belonging to the corporate culture, enacting its vision and personifying its mission. Replacing the formalities of the old primary discourses of command are the informalities of an apparent egalitarianism—the conversational meetings and chatty emails instead of the stiff old memos, the chummy retreats that aim to build interpersonal relationships and the training sessions that build corporate culture instead of the deference one used to show to the boss. Replacing self-interest and competition are relationships of sharing and collaboration, exemplified in open source software which is socially constructed, freely available and extremely valuable. And replacing line management are relationships of pedagogy: mentoring, training, and managing corporate knowledge in the learning organisation.

Multiliteracies by learning how to read and write multimodal texts which integrated the other modes with language.

teracy curriculum taught to a singular standard (grammar, the literary canon, standard national forms of the language), the everyday experience of meaning making was increasingly one of negotiating discourse differences. A pedagogy of Multiliteracies would need to address this as a fundamental aspect of contemporary teaching and learning.

The world was changing, the communications environment was changing, and it seemed to us to follow that literacy teaching and learning would to have to change, as well.

Discourses, then, is that it speaks to the meanings that insiders and outsiders to particular practices can and cannot make respectively. It reminds us that texts evoke interpretation on all kinds of levels that may only partially be “tappable” or “accessible” linguistically.

Encoding means rendering texts in forms that allow them to be retrieved, worked with, and made available independently of the physical presence of an enunciator.

We define literacies as “socially recognized ways of generating, communicating and negotiating meaningful content through the medium of encoded texts within contexts of participation in Discourses or as members of Discourses”

The “craft” of remix entails knowing the “technical stuff” of remixing.

Aspects of the “art” of remix When we talk about the “art” of remix we have generally in mind the aesthetics, appreciation, form and composition dimensions of remix practices. These are centrally concerned with the questions of what makes a remix “good” or of “high quality” and of the kinds of elements or components (including their modes) that go into effective and fertile remixes.

hey are not remixed, may not even be viewed, read or listened to more than a few times. This may be completely immaterial to the producers, for whom the full significance of the work might consist merely in bringing a creation to fruition, as an expression of fan appreciation, as self-expression, as another “self-identity constitutive move.”

If we claim in this case that “family” within the conventional biological taxonomy encompasses particular types of expressive media and services, then the concepts of “genus” and “species” help us to trace fertile interbreeding at both levels

Digital Remix: The Art and Craft of Endless HybridizationColin Lankshear and Michele Knobel Keynote presented to the International Reading Association Pre-Conference Institute “Using Technology to Develop and Extend the Boundaries of Literacy”, Toronto, 13 May 2007 IntroductionBy “remix” we mean the practice of taking cultural artefacts and combining and manipulating them into a new kind of creative blend. Until recently this concept was associated almost entirely with recorded music. It referred to using audio editing techniques to produce “an alternative mix of a recorded song that differed from the original, and involved taking apart the various instruments and components that make up a recording and remixing them into something that sounds completely different” (ethnomus.ucr.edu/remix_culture/remix_history.htm). This practice of remixing became very popular during the 1990s across a range of musical genres – notably, in hip hop, house and jungle music, but also in mainstream pop, and rhythm and blues, and even in heavy metal music (ibid.). Remixes sometimes simply provided a speedier version of a song, or a leaner, more stripped back sound, or an elongated song to keep people dancing longer. Once digital sound became the norm, however, all manner of mixing and “sampling” techniques were applied using different kinds of hardware devices or software on a computer (Hawkins 2004). This remains the dominant conception of remix. Recently, however, the concept has been expanded in important and interesting ways associated with activism contesting copyright and intellectual property legislation. Beginning with music remix, digital remixing has been the object of high profile and punitive legal action based on copyright law. The legal backlash against popular practices of remix has helped fuel an organized oppositional response to what is seen as unacceptable levels of constraint against the public use of cultural material – including a fascinating moment on 2 May, 2007, centering on the dissemination of code integral to overriding digital rights management restrictions on copying certain kinds of DVDs (see, for example, http://everydayliteracies.blogspot.com/2007/05/red-vs-blue-today-surely-goes-down-as.html). The concept of remix and remixing has become a rallying point for organized response to existing copyright arrangements: namely, within arguments developed by Lawrence Lessig (2004, 2005) for the need to establish a Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org). Lessig argues that digital remix constitutes a contemporary form of writing that is reaching the stature of a mass everyday cultural practice. Lawrence Lessig on digital remix as writingLessig (2005) claims that at a very general level all of culture can be understood in terms of remix, where someone creates a cultural product by mixing meaningful elements together (e.g., ideas from different people with ideas of one’s own), and then someone else comes along and remixes this cultural artefact with others to create yet another artefact.

Deep learning requires the learner being willing and able to take on a new identity in the world, to see the world and act on it in new ways.

He further notes that many of the tools young people increasingly have access to today are “smart tools” that have knowledge built into them in ways that enable them to “collaborate” with the tool users to do complex things that the tool user either could not do alone or could not do as effectively.

Moreover, it would be odd to think of others teaching the practitioners to integrate the three dimensions into their work

The technical dimension involves knowing one’s way around the processes and tools for encoding the meaning one seeks to articulate.

By “socially recognized ways” we mean something close to the concept of “practice” as it was developed by Scribner and Cole (1981) in relation to literacy. They defined practices as “socially developed and patterned ways of using technology and knowledge to accomplish tasks.” T

In the sense that each new mix becomes a meaning-making resource (affordance) for subsequent remixes, there is no “end” to remixing. Each remix in principle expands the possibilities for further remix.

Fan art

Lessig (2005) claims that at a very general level all of culture can be understood in terms of remix, where someone creates a cultural product by mixing meaningful elements together (e.g., ideas from different people with ideas of one’s own), and then someone else comes along and remixes this cultural artefact with others to create yet another artefact.

Lessig (2005) claims that at a very general level all of culture can be understood in terms of remix, where someone creates a cultural product by mixing meaningful elements together (e.g., ideas from different people with ideas of one’s own), and then someone else comes along and remixes this cultural artefact with others to create yet another artefact.

Expeditionary Project: Give Me Shelter

Creativity is a remix | Kirby Ferguson

Learning STEM Skills by Designing Video Games (Is School Enough? Series)

ultural Anthropologist Mimi Ito on Connected Learning, Children, and Digital Media

Henry Jenkins on Participatory Culture (Big Thinkers Series)

order of the image text is (relatively) open.

ll these are social meanings, specific to a particular culture. At the same time they are chosen, put together for their potential to mean, by the deliberate action of the designer. The sign – a complex message of words, of letters, of color and font-types with all their cultural resonances – reflects the interests of its designer as much as the designer’s imagined sense of those who will see and read the sign. The sign is based on a specific rhe-torical purpose, an intent to persuade with all means pos-sible those who pass by and notice it.

Each mode forces me into making certain kinds of commitments about meaning

he perspective of (Social) Semiotics, and more specifi-cally, from the perspective of multimodality, which deals with all the means we have for making meanings – the modes of representation – and considers their specific way of configuring the world.

Creation can be viewed simply as the act of producing, or causing to exist.  Construction is the building or assembling of an infrastructure.

Working online is a fluid experience which calls for flexible learners

In thinking about this question, I may be splitting hairs, but I believe that the word choice involved in identifying construction as opposed to creation is also of the utmost importance. Creation can be viewed simply as the act of producing, or causing to exist.  Construction is the building or assembling of an infrastructure. Construction is equal parts inspiration and perspiration. Construction calls on creativity as well as persistence, flexibility, and revision. Construction asks our students and teachers to focus on the power and patience employed during work process…and not just the final resultant work product.

“co - investigators”

(a) modeling an expert’s  performance; (b) understanding of the internal/external processes; (c) encouraging students to think and work like experts; (d) application of knowledge in different contexts; and (e) demonstrating how to cope with difficulties

(a) modeling, (b) coaching, (c) scaffolding, and (d) empowering students to acquire a role as a self-motivated learner

modeling, coaching and fading steps

As a result, teaching and learning using elements of OCC affords opportunities for students to not only participate in global conversations, but also in some cases empower them for their future as literate individuals

includes the enculturation of students into authentic practices through activity and social interaction in an online environment (Hennessey, 1993) in an attempt to embed learning in activity

There are usually four dimensions considered in cognitive apprenticeship (e.g., content, methods, sequence, sociology) when embedding learning in activity using a classroom’s social and physical contexts

By encouraging students to construct online content as opposed to the traditional writing  process, they are enabled to “communicate with one another using the codes and conventions of society”

The work involved in OCC includes expository, persuasive, or argumentative texts formed by students while they are engaged in the online inquiry process.

In effect, work such as this helps build aspects of critical engagement between students and text to promote social  justice through process and product.

d esign combines the “process and product”

Multimodal design identifies the interchange between linguistic, visual, audio, gestural, spatial, and multimodal elements (New London Group, 2000; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001; Jewitt, 2008). Information created using elements of multimodal design must consider the mode and media chosen by the student as a crucial concept in constructing meaning (Doneman, 1997). Research has found that “the ways in which something is represented shape both what   is to be learned, that is, the curriculum content, and how  it is to be learned ”

task or purpose, and possibly share with others to obtain another perspective on their work.

Online reading and writing has been described as a more social and interactive act than traditional communication because it focuses on both the process and the purpose of the participation of many, rather than the private act of an individual

the key difference between the traditional writing process and OCC is that teachers and students need to consider other elements that are particular to working with online informational text (e.g., semiotics, visual literacy, multimodal design)

OCC is defined as the skills, strategies and dispositions necessary as students construct, redesign, or reinvent online texts by actively encoding and decoding meaning through the use of digital texts and tools.

186Written Communicationnotion of social relations includes but is not limited to interactivity, whichusually refers to the learner’s engagement with and transformation ortransduction of the text. In recontextualization there is inevitably a socialrepositioning: A certain pedagogy emerges as the consequence of there-contextualization.

Features of the social environment shape rhetorical/representational decisions. What may be most significant in the originatingenvironment may not be so in the environment of recontextualization.

What epistemological frame isbest for this audience and this purpose, and in what order is it best to presentthe curricular entities to learners?

We see four rhetorical/semiotic principles operating in the process ofrecontextualisation: selection, arrangement, foregrounding and socialrepositioning.

econtextualization is, literally, moving meaning materialfrom onecontext with its social organization of participants and its modal ensemblesto another, with its different social organization and modal ensembles.

hatever the semiotic—modal and/or medial—change, it entails achange of social context. Of course changes in social context themselvesbring with them changes in the semiotic materialization of meaning.

Every mode imposes/demandssuch commitments as a matter of course, though each such set of commit-ments is different. That has to be part of the designer’s consideration.

Modes have different materiality and it, shaped by the histories of culturalwork, has produced the specific affordances of a mode. Given that differencein material and cultural work, there can never be a perfect translation fromone mode to another: Image does not have “word,” just as writing does nothave “depiction”; forms of arrangement (i.e., syntax) differ in modes that aretemporally or spatially instantiated. Transduction inevitably brings profoundchanges in the move from one mode to the other. In such contexts we can askabout gains and losses in the process of modal change.

Design is the practice where modes, media, frames, and sites of display onthe one hand, and rhetorical purposes, the designer’s interests, and the char-acteristics of the audience on the other are brought into coherence with eachother. From the designer’s perspective, design is the (intermediary) processof giving shape to the interests, purposes, and intentions of the rhetor inrelation to the semiotic resources available for realizing/materializing thesepurposes as apt material, complex signs, texts for the assumed characteris-tics of a specific audience.

Such changes in media are always subjectto social contestation. As one current example, walls and other surfaces(e.g., [underground] trains) are transformed into medium by graffiti artists.

Mode and modal uses have to be considered together with the mediumof distribution involved in communication. Medium has a material and asocial aspect. Materially, medium is the substance in and through whichmeaning is instantiated/realized and through which meaning becomesavailable to others (cf. “oil on canvas”). From that perspective, print (aspaper-and-print) is medium; by extension, the book is medium, if differ-ently, the screen another; and the “speaker-as-body-and-voice” yet another.

That is, modes have different affordances—potentials and constraints for making meaning.

A modeis a socially and culturally shaped resource for making meaning.Image, writing, layout, speech,moving image are examples of modes, allused in learning resources.

The producer’s aswell as the audience’s interests are shaped by the social, cultural, economic,political, and technological environments in which signs are made; the designis the result of the interaction between all of these. At the same time signmakers have to be aware of the media of distribution for their signs and thatawareness is factored into the making of the sign

Signs areelements in which meaning and form have been brought together in a rela-tion motivated by the interest of the sign maker.

Media—the means for the distribution of mes-sages—also have affordances, so that changes in media have social and epis-temological effects. We include these in our discussion and in the theoreticalframework we develop here, even though they are outside our focus.

If, going one step further, we comparea contemporary textbook with “pages” on the Web dealing with the “same”issues, we see that modes of representation other than image and writing—moving image and speech for instance—have found their way into learningresources, with significant effect.

The digital media, rather than the (text) book, aremore and more the site of appearance and distribution of learning resources,and writing is being displaced by image as the central mode for representa-tion.

What classifies something as being a creation?  When are we allowed to take ownership of something we make?  Are true "creations" only composed from raw materials?  Or is it the idea and design decisions regardless of the source of materials which makes something a "new" creation? These are the thoughts which ran through my head after watching Kirby Ferguson's TED talk on "remixing." 

Typical forms of content creation include maintaining and updating web sites, blogging, article writing, photography, videography, online commentary, the maintenance of social media accounts, and editing and distribution of digital media. A Pew survey described content creation as the creation of "the material people contribute to the online world."[3]

Meanwhile, school was a place which inculcated a rudimentary ‘basics’. Literacy, in fact, was two of the ‘three R’s’: reading, writing and arithmetic. Children memorised spelling lists, and learnt the parts of speech and correct grammar. School was a universe of straightforwardly right and wrong answers, of authoritative texts and authoritarian teachers. The underlying lesson of the basics was about the social order and its sources of authority, a lesson which was appropriate for a society which expected its workers to be passively disciplined.

Finally, Martin Nakata’s research on indigenous literacy has used the Multiliteracies concept to discuss literacy in ‘interface’ identities, or learners living between the ‘mainstream’ and the ‘margins’

A pedagogy of Multiliteracies also opens access to powerful learning to a broader spread of learners in a world where diversity is becoming all the more critical

Or, insofar as these two goals might at times be at odds, a transformative pedagogy could be used to support either view

standardised testing

13skin sensations (heat/cold, texture, pressure), grasp, manipulable objects, artefacts, cooking and eating, aromas.•Gestural Representation: movements of the hands and arms, expressions of the face, eye movements and gaze, demeanours of the body, gait, clothing and fashion, hair style, dance, action sequences (Scollon, 2001), timing, frequency, ceremony and ritual. Here gesture is understood broadly and metaphorically as a physical act of signing (as in ‘a gesture to ...’), rather than the narrower literal meaning of hand and arm movement. Representation to oneself may take the form of feelings and emotions or rehearsing action sequences in one’s mind’s eye.•Spatial Representation: proximity, spacing, layout, interpersonal distance, territoriality, architecture/building, streetscape, cityscape, landscape

all forms of representation, including language, should be regarded as dynamic processes of transformation rather than processes of reproduction.

Diversity is pivotal in today’s lifeworlds, and much more profoundly and pervasively so than the straightforward demographic groupings which underwrote an earlier identity politics of gender, ethnicity, race and disability—forms of politics which first unsettled the hoped-for homogeneity of mass society and the nation-state

an active, bottom-up citizenship in which people can take a self-governing role in the many divergent communities of their lives

selling them to corporations.

lass ceilings’.

he chummy retreats that aim to build interpersonal relationships and the training sessions that build corporate culture instead of the deference one used to show to the boss

As befits the public rhetoric about the ‘knowledge economy’, ‘human capital’ is now presented as the key to having a ‘competitive edge’, whether that be the skills and knowledge of an individual seeking employment, or the aggregate of human capital in an enterprise, or the international competitiveness of a regional or national workforce in the world economy.

n this phase,the teacher provides students with real examples of online information that students can use to compare their work product to. Students are encouraged to review this exemplar material and review the work in relation to their own process and product completed to this point.

the classroom teacher is to work as a facilitator in the classroom and allow students to work the majority of the time on the construction of online content. Teachers may start a classroom period with a “mini-lesson

he OCC model provides guidance on elements of cognitive apprenticeship, writing research and the use of ICTs as a tool to allow students to express learning and experience to themselves and others

his process of modeling, coaching, and then fading of instruction involvesfive important processes: (a) modeling an expert’s performance; (b) understanding of the internal/external processes; (c) encouraging students to think and work like experts; (d) application of knowledge in different contexts; and (e) demonstrating how to cope with difficulties

There are usually four dimensions considered in cognitive apprenticeship (e.g., content, methods, sequence, sociology) when embedding learning in activity using a classroom’s social and physical contexts

multimodal design refers to the use of different “modes”to recontextualize a body of knowledge for a specific audience

Student review of work process embeddedin the instructional model

OCC was developed to define the abilities necessary to communicate the information assembled while searching, sifting, and synthesizing knowledge gained during the online inquiry process

Authentically and effectively integrating the Internet and other communication technologies (ICTs) into the classroom is a social imperative given theability to empower students in the reader/writer nature inherent in the online informational space