Joel Bloch's Blog (4)

A professor of writing and technology recently posted a comment on another list about the difficulties of getting students to appreciate tagging. She mentioned that she tried to get them to think about tagging in rhetorical terms - understanding the needs of the audience in particular rhetorical contexts, etc. It makes me think about whether we are talking about tagging as a form of literacy or as a rhetorical tool for achieving a particular response?

My favorite digital literacy is digital story telling. I've introduced it as part of a writing course for the past year. Digital stories are personal stories voiced by the writer + images + a soundtrack. They allow students to explore the relationships between words and images, give them a sense both as a writer and a creator of digital content, and let them share their work with the classmates and anyone else they want to.They work with a variety of technologies - blogger to post and share… Continue

Keen isn't the only one making this argument. Other journalists in particular are wondering how the lack of gatekeepers and the easy ability to publish will have on their profession. It's like a topic i sometimes hear about ESL teaching: some people believe that anybody who speaks English can teach it, so why pay us. Even some advocates of multimedia literacy are beginning to think there needs to be some pushback.This is what I feel when I hear Wesch. I don't know if this show is accessible… Continue

The importance of Pegrum's idea of lenses is that it makes us look at multiliteracies from outside of our own perspective. Personally, I use other lenses - history of literacy, nature of technology, writing pedagogies - to frame the discussion but the important thing is that to understand multiliteracies we need to cross over to many different areas of thinking.