The theory and practices of new literacies and the work of Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel has inspired Allan Martin and Jan Grudziecki’s model of digital literacy development, introduced in The End No 3:1, so new literacies is the second approach to digital literacies, I’ll plunge into. Seen through the lens of Martin and Grudziecki’s model, new literacies align especially with the levels of digital usage and digital transformation.
New literacies as digital literacies
In In an era of knowledge abundance – Part 1 I referred to Bonnie Stewart for seeing digital literacies as new literacies of participation and for framing the legitimacy structures and practices in education, she nails as in a sense literacies. And thus, she quoted Lankshear and Knobel on new literacies (2007):
“The more a literacy practice privileges participation over publishing, distributed expertise over centralized expertise, collective intelligence over individual possessive intelligence, collaboration over individuated authorship, dispersion over scarcity, sharing over ownership, experimentation over “normalization,” innovation and evolution over stability and fixity, creative-innovative rule breaking over generic purity and policing, relationship over information broadcast, and so on, the more we should regard it as a “new” literacy. (p. 21)”
This description is a snapshot in the evolution of new literacies as they are conceived of by Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel. In their book, “New Literacies: Changing Knowledge and Classroom Learning” (2003), they introduce new literacies in the context of New Literacy Studies and a sociocultural approach to literacy:
“In addition, the sociocultural approach to literacy overtly rejects the idea that textual practices are even largely, let alone solely, a matter of processes that ‘go on in the head’, or that essentially involve heads communicating with each other by means of graphic signs. From a sociocultural perspective literacy is a matter of social practices. Literacies are bound up with social, institutional and cultural relationships, and can only be understood when they are situated within their social, cultural and historical contexts (Gee et al. 1996:xii). Moreover, they are always connected to social identities – to being particular kinds of people. Literacies are always embedded in Discourses (Gee 2000). Texts are integral parts of innumerable everyday ‘lived, talked, enacted, value-and-belief-laden practices’ that are ‘carried out in specific places and at specific times.’ (Gee et al. 1996:3). Reading and writing are not the same things within a youth zine culture…, an online chat space, a school classroom, a feminist reading group, or within different kinds of religious ceremonies. People read and write differently out of different social practices, and these different ways with words are part of different ways of being persons and different ways and facets of doing life.” (Lankshear and Knobel 2003:8)
“This has important implications. From a sociocultural perspective, it is impossible to separate out from text-mediated social practices the ‘bits’ concerned with reading and writing (or any other sense of ‘literacy’) and to treat them independently of all the ‘non-print’ bits, like values and gestures, context and meaning, actions and objects, talk and interaction, tools and spaces. They are all non-substractable parts of integrated wholes. ‘Literacy bits’ do not exist apart from the social practices in which they are embedded and within which they are acquired. If, in some trivial sense they can be said to exist (e.g.) as code, they do not mean anything. Hence, they cannot meaningfully be taught and learned separate from the rest of the practice (Gee 1996).” (Lankshear and Knobel 2003:8)
Lankshear and Knobel distinguish New Literacy Studies from new literacies by seeing them using ‘new’ in a paradigmatic respectively an ontological way: “The paradigmatic sense occurs in talk of the New Literacy Studies (Street 1993; Gee 1996,2000) to refer to a specific sociocultural approach to understanding and researching literacy.” (Lankshear and Knobel 2003:16), whereas the ontological sense of ‘new’ is what is the main concern to Lankshear and Knobel :
“What we are calling the ontological sense of ‘new’ refers to the idea that changes have occurred in the character and substance of literacies associated with changes in technology, institutions, media, the economy, and the rapid movement toward global scale in manufacture, finance, communications and so on. These changes have impacted on social practices in all the main areas of everyday life within modern societies: in work, at leisure, in the home, in education, in the community, and in the public sphere. Established social practices have been transformed, and new forms of social practices have emerged and continue to emerge at the rapid rate. Many of these new and changing social practices involve new and changing ways of producing, distributing, exchanging and receiving texts by electronic means. These have generated new multimodal forms of texts that can arrive via digital code…as sound, text, images, video, animations and any combinations of these.” (Lankshear and Knobel 2003:16)
“In this ontological sense, the category of ‘new literacies’ largely covers what are often referred to as ‘post-typographic’ forms of textual practice. These include using and constructing hyperlinks between documents and /or images, sounds, movies, semiotic languages (such as those used by the characters in the online episodic game Banja, or emoticons (‘smileys’) used in email, online chat space or instant messaging, manipulating a mouse to move around within a text, reading file extensions and identifying what software will ‘read’ each file, producing ‘non-linear’ texts, navigating three-dimensional worlds online and so on.“ (Lankshear and Knobel 2003:16-17; Martin and Grudziecki 2006:253)
Lankshear and Knobel operate with two broad categories of new literacies: 1) the post-typographic literacies just introduced above, and 2) literacies “…that are comparatively new in chronological terms and/or that are (or will be) new to being recognized as literacies – even within the sociocultural perspective. Literacies in this second category may have little or nothing to do with use of (new) digital electronic technologies. In some cases, however, they may well comprise new technologies within their own right.” (Lankshear and Knobel 2003:24-25)(my underlining). I see transmedia storytelling, online communities of practice, personal learning networks and network and networking literacies as examples of this.
Investigating and interpreting new literacies
A major achievement of the studies of new literacies is that they document the ongoing development of digital literacies and other new forms of literacies at the current point in their evolution and reflect on their relevance to school and educational settings. As a result of that, Lankshear and Knobel always give some typical examples of new literacies whenever they report on the state of affairs concerning new literacies, although it also causes some repetition in the quotations and the arguments as the uses of new literacies evolve. They suggest in their book, “…that to be useful, the investigation and interpretation of new literacies should involve descriptive, analytical and critical accounts.” (Lankshear and Knobel 2003:45)
A descriptive account will tell of and uncover practices: “The field needs rich descriptive sociological accounts of new literacies. Ideally these will be produced as much as possible by insiders who can ‘tell it like it is practiced’… (Lankshear and Knobel 2003:45). This priority of informants and an ethnographical approach anchors new literacies within the sociocultural understanding of New Literacy Studies introduced earlier.
An analytic account will expose how meaning making takes place: “Different forms of analytic work are relevant to studying and documenting new literacies…At one level of analysis one might identify and relate the Discourse and discourse aspects of a set of social practices (i.e. the ways of speaking, acting, believing, thinking, etc. that signal one as a member of a particular Discourse, along with the ‘language bits’ of this Discourse; Gee 1996). As a different analytic level, the work might involve a form of sociological imagination (Mills 1959): exploring how subjectivity and identity are related to participation in or membership of Discourses in which new literacies are developed, employed, refined and transformed.” (Lankshear and Knobel 2003:46-47)
Gee distinguishes between 1) Discourse with a capital D, grasping and conceptualizing ways of being in the world that integrates identities, and 2) discourse with a small letter which refers to the ‘language bits’, that is the language use of a specific Discourse (Lankshear and Knobel 2003:22, Note 1). This points to literacies as plural and context-dependent and to meaning making as socially negotiated, so these aspects of literacies are at the same time seen as determinant factors in new literacies as well as being means of doing, making and being in a culture and in the world.
A critical-evaluative account will consider the role and legitimacy of new literacies in formal literacy education: “Two types of critical-evaluative accounts of new literacies seem especially important in relation to literacy education…One type involves taking an ethical perspective toward new literacies, such that we can make sound and fair judgements that have educational relevance about the worth of particular new literacies and the legitimacy of their claims to places within formal literacy programmes.” (Lankshear and Knobel 2003:48)
“The second kind of critique we have in mind involves taking a curriculum and pedagogy perspective based on the criterion of efficacious learning. From a sociocultural perspective,
“the focus of learning and education is not children, nor schools, but human lives seen as trajectories through multiple social practices in various social institutions. If learning is to be efficacious, then what a child or adult does now as a learner must be connected in meaningful and motivated ways with ‘mature’ (insider) versions of related social practices.” (Gee et al. 1996:4)
For literacy education to be soundly based, we must be able to demonstrate the efficacy of any and every literacy that is taught compulsorily. This, of course, immediately questions the basis of much, if not most, of what currently passes for literacy education.” (Lankshear and Knobel 2003:48-49)
These questions of the legitimacy of new literacies within formal literacy education recall Bonnie Stewart’s framing of what she sees as literacies of participation:
“The more a literacy practice privileges participation over publishing, distributed expertise over centralized expertise, collective intelligence over individual possessive intelligence, collaboration over individuated authorship, dispersion over scarcity, sharing over ownership, experimentation over “normalization,” innovation and evolution over stability and fixity, creative-innovative rule breaking over generic purity and policing, relationship over information broadcast, and so on, the more we should regard it as a “new” literacy. (p. 21)”
Both the questions of legitimacy and the question of efficacious learning tell of practices, expose how meaning making is up for change, and inquire into the relevance of social, participatory and collaborative practices in education in general. So new literacies may be said to question and challenge the idea of education, as we associate it with the modern period and the industrial society. And at the second level of critique, it links the perspectives and ideas of Lankshear and Knobel to the debates on traditional and new models of education and teaching and learning taken into consideration by Martin Weller and Caroline Haythornthwaite, as they are summed up in The End No 1.
New literacies in the current historical period: ‘the new ethos stuff’
In other words, the critical-evaluative questions regarding new literacies operate on the continuum between two paradigms, moving away from the modern/industrial paradigm and towards the postmodern/post-industrial/knowledge society paradigm, which Lankshear and Knobel introduce in their article, “’New’ Literacies: technologies and values” (2012), as one of their updates on new literacies capturing the current point in their evolution.
In the article they emphasize this continuum, already mentioned in their book, and stress, that “…new literacies are best understood in terms of an historical period of social, cultural, institutional, economic, and intellectual change that is likely to span many decades – some of which are already behind us…From this perspective we suggest that the kinds of practices we currently identify as new literacies will cease to be ‘new’ once the social ways characterizing the ascending paradigm have become sufficiently established and grounded to be regarded as conventional.” (Lankshear and Knobel 2012:45-46). So Lankshear and Knobel outline the characteristics of the current historical period connected to this ascending new paradigm and the two core concepts concerning new literacies: ‘the new technical stuff’ and ‘the new ethos stuff’. ‘The new ethos stuff’ comes to the front, though:
“We have reached a point where it is necessary to draw some distinctions around the idea of ‘a new ethos’. We began by talking about an ascending paradigm that reflects a different way of thinking about people, social practices and processes, and social phenomena like expertise and intelligence from how such things were thought about under an earlier paradigm. We have talked briefly about how, during recent decades, economic activity – work – has been re-described, understood, and re-structured along lines in which values of participation, collaboration, distributed systems (of expertise, intelligence, team-orientation) have been emphasized. The ‘new’ capitalism pursues new ways of identifying workers and giving them new identities, in association with new ways of organizing their activity (roles, relationships, performances), with a view to enhancing the economic viability of enterprises and bureaucracies (Gee et al. 1996). This is a new angle on an existing game – a new way to create economic value/profit/capital accumulation/efficiency through leverage within a process of coaxing employees to take on new identities as members of a ‘community’ rather than as individuals who just happen to work in this place, for this boss or this company. The end game remains more or less the same, but is now played under a new kind of ‘ethos’: by affiliates collaborating with each other in a shared mission”. (Lankshear and Knobel 2012:60)
“We have described how this kind of business model and ‘ethos’ was named for the web: as Web 2.0. A new architecture established the web as an interactive platform whereby enterprises could accumulate value by creating conditions and practices – literacies, no less – where uses could generate value that companies/site proprietors could harness. This is Web 2.0 as a business model. At the same time, the architecture supporting this business model represents something of a shift in applied ethos from the more oneway, broadcast-oriented model retrospectively named Web 1.0. We worked our way through a staged sequence of selected examples, seeking to shift the focus from web-mediated collaborations and distributions grounded in leveraging user activity in the interests of the economic viability of an enterprise toward an emphasis on ways in which the impressive affordances of Web 2.0 as an interactive platform enable users to participate in affinities. These are affinities where their participation and collaboration enact relationships to/with others and their shared interests, and contribute collectively to building the affinity and a sense of membership in that affinity.” (Lankshear and Knobel 2012:60-61)
So far, this analytic account has identified the Discourse and discourse aspects of a set of social practices and ways of being in the world: the ‘new’ capitalism and ‘Web 2.0’ coined by Tim O’Reilly as a business model, as well as the architecture of Web 2.0 as “…a specific concrete instance of the tendency toward thinking and acting, and otherwise organizing ways for doing everyday life – and particularly, for doing literacies – around values central to the currently ascending social paradigm…” like collaboration, distributed expertise, collective intelligence, communities of practice, and team orientation. (Lankshear and Knobel 2012:59).
This specific level of analysis points to discourse with a small letter, I would say, and reveals how people are ‘joining’ literacies as ways of doing, making and being in the world in order to learn the language of Discourse, so to speak, like “values and gestures, context and meaning, action and objects, talk and interaction, tools and spaces” (Lankshear and Knobel 2003:8):
“While our interest here is wider than learning per se, many of the key features of affinity spaces that enable learning are nonetheless the very ‘stuff’ of how contemporary literacies are constituted and experienced more generally by people engaging in them. Gee describes affinity spaces as:
“specially designed spaces (physical and virtual) constructed to resource people [who are] tied together…by a shared interest or endeavor…[For example, the] many websites and publications devoted to [the videogame ‘Rise of Nations’] create a social space in which people can, to any degree they wish, small or large, affiliate with others to share knowledge and gain knowledge that is distributed and dispersed across many different people, places, Internet sites and modalities (magazines, chat rooms, guides, recordings)” (Gee, 2004:9,73)
Affinity spaces instantiate participation, collaboration, distribution and dispersion of expertise, and relatedness (ibid., Ch. 6th). These features are integral to the ‘ethos stuff’ of what we mean by ‘new’ literacies.” (Lankshear and Knobel 2012:58)
New literacies in the current historical period: ‘the new technical stuff’
It is not just the new ethos that needs to be in focus. Equally important is ‘the new technical stuff’ and the two need to be kept together within the frame of new literacies according to Lankshear and Knobel:
“The technical stuff of new literacies is part and parcel of generating, communicating, and negotiating encoded meanings by providing a range of new or more widely accessible resource possibilities (‘affordances’) for making meaning. The technical dimensions of digital technologies greatly enlarge ways of generating encoded meanings available to people in comparison with what we might call conventional literacies.” (Lankshear and Knobel 2012:51)
They give an example of generating a version of the Sad Keanu (Reeves) meme – an encoded multimodal text from 2010, still to be found online in reports on its life cycle but by now followed by other Keanu Reeves memes – that to a great extend imitate ‘the processes of digital literacy’ described by Allan Martin and Jan Grudziecki while performing a range of digital competences to produce a remixed version of the meme: “Someone with access to a family standard computer or other mobile digital device and internet connection, and who has some basic knowledge of standard software applications can create a diverse range of meaningful artifacts using a strictly finite set of physical operations or technologies (keying, clicking, selecting, copying, dragging), in a relatively tiny space, with just one or two (albeit complex) ‘tools’.“(Lankshear and Knobel 2012:51). And at a more general level, this example illustrates that:
“The shift from material inscriptions to digital coding, from analogue to digital representations, has unleashed conditions and possibilities that are massively new. In the case of the shift from print to the post-typographic, Bill Cope (in Cope et al., 2005) describes what this means for the visual rendering of texts. He explains that digital technologies reduce the basic unit of composition from the level of character to a point below character level. In the case of a text on a screen, the unit of composition is reduced to pixels. This means that text and images can be rendered together seamlessly and relatively easily on the same page and, moreover, that text can be layered into images both static and moving – (and viceversa) in ways that were very difficult, and in some respects impossible to do physically with the resources of print.
“…[Moreover] if you go back one layer beyond pixels, the same compositional stuff produces sound as well. So you have got these basic things about human communication – namely language, visuals and sound – which are all being manufactures in the same raw material on the same plane in the same platform (in Cope et al., 2005:200)”” (Lankshear and Knobel 2012:53)
Along the same lines, the kinds of possibilities for ‘enabling’ and ‘sharing’ are new:
“Even the concept of ‘text’ as understood in conventional print terms becomes a hazy concept when considering the array of expressive media now available to everyday folk. Diverse practices of ‘remixing’ – where a range of existing materials are copied, cut, spliced, edited, reworked, and mixed into a new creation – have become highly popular in part because of the quality of product ‘ordinary people’ can achieve.” (Lankshear and Knobel 2012:54-55)
So whether it is about digital remix practices or uploading and distributing user-generated content to a social network site or platform, the new is about enabling:
“This enabling capacity of what essentially is binary code and associated hardware – the new technical ‘stuff’ – is integral to most of the new literacies that will concern us here. A lot of this enabling is by now so commonplace that we take it for granted, such as in everyday templates and interfaces.” (Lankshear and Knobel 2012: 55)
New literacies in the current historical period: participatory forms
With ‘the new technical stuff’ being part of generating, communicating and negotiating encoded meaning, and the ‘new ethos stuff’ emphasizing ways of doing, making and being that instantiate participation, collaboration and distributed expertise, Lankshear and Knobel draw up a participatory configuration of ‘the new ethos’ as an ideal:
“Participatory configurations of the new ethos are intimated in the difference between someone who wants to create, say a podcast for some kind of personal purpose or as a personal expression, and those whose podcasting activities arise from motivations like ‘an urge to create a shared space where, for example, fans can discuss their mutual interests in Severus Snape, or where church members can hold prayer circles, or where comic book buffs can interview writers and artists’ (Jenkins, 2010:234). In other words, participation, collaboration, and distributed systems of expertise, knowledge/wisdom/ intelligence and cultural production assume participatory forms within communities and networks of shared interests or affinities that have the kinds of characteristics associated with current conceptions of ‘participation in affinity spaces’ (Gee, 2004), ‘participatory cultures’ (Jenkins et al., 2006), ‘communities of practice’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991), and so on. These terms are widely used to capture the idea of networks and communities of shared interests where people associate, affiliate, and interact in kinds of ‘collective enterprise’ in order to pursue and go as deeply as they wish into their ‘affinities’ or what they are especially interested in.” (Lankshear and Knobel 2012:63)
“Such activity involves collectively building, resourcing, and maintaining interactive spaces, whether face to face, virtual, or mixes of both, where participants can contribute to and draw upon myriad resources and means for building and enacting identities based on interests, in collaboration with others. Participants play diverse roles and learn from each other ‘in the process of working together to achieve shared goals.’ From a new media literacies perspective, Jenkins and colleagues (2006:3) define a participatory culture in terms of environments and social practices where there are
“relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship where what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another (Jenkins et al., 2006:3) “” (Lankshear and Knobel 2012:63-64)
“…members of participatory cultures are involved in building and resourcing entire ‘systems’ and networks for developing and enacting identities (and ways of creative doing and being and making) within the very processes of pursuing and enacting these identities. They are collectively building, and developing the conditions and terrain for their interest-based engagements, as an entire enterprise, as distinct from participating in ‘an enterprise of others’ (proprietary), or drawing on established enterprises to engage in individual or personal goal-directed pursuits with no entrinsic or necessary investment in furthering the community, networks, or affinity space per se.” (Lankshear and Knobel 2012:64)
So when all the pieces come together – the definitions, the concepts, and the descriptive, analytic and critical-evaluative accounts investigating and interpreting new literacies, their digital contexts and their place within an ascending social paradigm – they reveal an ideal ‘frame’ for understanding the character and role of new literacies:
“…we believe that the closer the ‘new ethos’ dimension approximates to the forms of engagement, collaboration, sharing and distributed expertise and ‘authorship’ that define ‘participatory cultures’ (ibid.), the more we should regard a literacy practice as ‘new’. This involves a values stance based on an ideal of social learning that is actively undermined by existing educational arrangements and the wider social structures and arrangements they support (e.g. credentialing, differential allocation of scarce rewards, consumer commodity production, ownership and property relations, etc.). Paradigm [strongest possible] cases of new literacies confront established social structures and relationships in ways we consider progressive, or ‘better’. They are more inclusive, more egalitarian, more responsive to human needs, interests and satisfactions, and they model the ideal of people working together for collective good and benefit, rather than pitting individuals against one another in the cause of maintaining social arrangements that divide people radically along lines of success, status, wealth, and privilege.” (Lankshear and Knobet 2012:67)
In other words, it is this broad ‘ethos’ of new literacies that differentiates new literacies from being conventional literacies in digital form (Lankshear and Knobel 2014:98).
Skills, knowledge and tools in use within social practices
In their article, “Studying New Literacies” (2014), Lankshear and Knobel follow up on their previous work on new literacies once again. They elaborate on how new literacies research has focused on skills, knowledge and tools in use within social practices, and they gather how researchers are interested in how participants have been producing, distributing, sharing and negotiating meaning in a range of contexts outside school and aim at introducing changing literacy practices in teaching and learning in schools in order to educate for the future (Knobel & Lankshear 2014:97). In the article Lankshear and Knobel offer a list of classroom practices gained from learners, participants and informants from informal practices outside school. The list reveals findings from new literacies research they reckon are worth teachers’ consideration in relation to design, facilitation and teaching in K-12 schools, but, still, they are just as relevant to discussing digital literacies in higher education. I will give a short version here, but do check out the entire list in the article:
- Not everyone has to know or be good at exactly the same thing; often outcomes are richer when young people bring different bits and pieces of knowledge and know-how to collaborative efforts (Gee & Hayes, 2013). Schools, however, tend to insist on everyone knowing the same thing in the same way.
- Ongoing cycles of feedback, mentoring, and support from others – novices and experts alike – who share the same interest or goals play a crucial role in learning and practicing new literacies (Black, 2008). Schools usually privilege teacher feedback over peer feedback on work-in-progress; assessment tends to be summative and focus on technical details, with little in-progress advice or mentoring regarding production within a particular specialized space or domain.
- Doing, contributing, making, and sharing are significant activities (Alverman, 2010; Ito et al., 2010). Schools approach knowledge in terms of consuming information and practicing teacher-taught strategies, often driven by packaged curriculum and textbooks, rather than in terms of production by insiders to a field and novices learning to become insiders.
- Young people “pull” on available resources – content, materials, people – right at the point of need as they are working on something (Leander & Mills, 2007). This just-in-time approach to learning contrasts with schools and their tendency to “push” a broad range of content at students for abstract, “just-in-case” purposes (Hagel & Brown, 2005).
- Remixing cultural items to produce new works is valued and central to cultural development within societies (Lankshear & Knobel, 2011). This challenges schools’ assumption about the importance of individualized authorship and the production of “original” work.
- Distributing effort and the ability to communicate with others across distance, cultures, and languages matters (Curwood, Magnifico, & Lammers, 2013; Lam, 2009). Practical experiences entailing such things are less than common in schools.
- Playing with and exploring the affordances of a technology or online space balanced with serious work is a key element in learning to “be” someone, like a machinima artist, a games designer, a video editor, etc. (Ito et al., 2010). After the early grades, schools are concerned most with students being “on task” with little room for playful and exploratory experimentation. (Knobel & Lankshear 2014:99-100)
In the article Lankshear and Knobel stress the idea of new literacies and its sociocultural orientation this way:
“A practice orientation to new literacies examines new literacies in terms of technology, knowledge and skills – where skills are understood as “co-ordinated sets of action”, and practices as “socially developed and patterned ways of using technology and knowledge to accomplish tasks [that are] directed to [realizing] socially recognized goals [or purposes].” (Schreibner & Cole, 1981,p. 236). As practices, literacies – all literacies, “new” or conventional – involve bringing technology, knowledge, and skills together within contexts of social purpose.” (Knobel & Lankshear 2014:98)
The examples of classroom practices listed above are descriptive and critical-evaluative accounts of this practice orientation, but at the same time they show how new literacies challenge old systems of legitimacy like control and validation, and they exceed the traditional model of education, as mentioned earlier, when they emphasize participation and participatory culture as core values:
“New technical stuff can be, and typically is, introduced into classrooms without challenging the established culture of classroom education one iota (Cuban, 2003; Lankshear and Knobel, 2006: Ch.2; Jenkins, 2010). It is impossible, however, to engage with learning from the standpoint of participatory culture without seeing how its learning model challenges ‘the cultural context that surrounds contemporary education’. (Jenkins 2010:241).” (Lankshear and Knobel 2012:67)
So altogether new literacies go along with participation as a metaphor of learning and with Learning 2.0 as a more personalized and experiential form of learning that “…involves engaging learners in apprenticeship for different kinds of knowledge practice, new processes of inquiry, dialogue, and connectivity” as Beetham and Sharpe have put it (McLoughlin and Lee 2008:12) as quoted in The End No 2.
‘Learning to be’: text production and meaning making & social learning processes
In a recent article, “Education and ‘new literacies’ in the middle years” (2018), Lankshear and Knobel revisit their mapping of new literacy practices and more explicitly plot the course of learning , although they are still interested in more than learning ‘per se’. Their view on what new literacies might mean now is seconded by what they call a broad ‘philosophy of education’ as their answer to the questions about what education is for and what education is about. Still, the starting point is that new literacies are characterized by two things: 1) the shift from analogue to digital code and literacies being mediated by digital tool which is characterized as ‘a new technological dimension to ‘new literacies’’ – earlier introduced as ‘the new technical stuff’ – and 2) the possibilities of “…participating in collaborative ways in the creation, editing, refinement, etc. of the same text”, which is seen as “…a new kind of ‘ethos’ possible in ways and on a scale not previously imaginable” (Lankshear and Knobel 2018:8)(my underlining) – earlier characterized as ‘the new ethos stuff’. Lankshear and Knobel are summing up these two dimensions of new literacies much in accordance with their book and earlier articles, but with the difference that ‘texts’ and ‘text production’ in the broadest possible sense are now being coined as a part of the vocabulary within new literacies:
“The technical and ethos dimension of ‘new’ practices of text production is to create, communicate, share and negotiate meanings come together in ways that have been captured in concepts like ‘participatory culture’ (Jenkins et al., 2016; Jenkins, Ito & boyd, 2015) and ‘affinity spaces’ (Gee, 2004). While both concepts are relatively recent coinings, forms of participatory culture and affinity spaces have always existed where people join together to participate and collaborate in forms of shared activity; to build fields of shared interest; to share expertise and resources and so on. The local sports field is as much a space for participating in a shared activity as an app-based service like Musical.ly (a music video generating and sharing network).” (Lankshear and Knobel 2018:8)
“Affinity spaces refer to any kind of physical or virtual space that has been specially designed to resource the activity of people who are ‘tied together by a shared interest or endeavor’ (Gee, 2001, p.9). They are social spaces that enable people, to whatever extent they choose, to ‘affiliate with others to share knowledge and gain knowledge [relevant to engaging in their interest] that is distributed and dispersed across many different people, places, Internet sites, and modalities (magazines, chatrooms, guides, recordings)’ (Gee, 2004, p.73). Of course, what has happened in the age of digital electronic technologies and networks is that online affinity spaces have vastly amplified the possible scope, speed, diversity, scale, and range of affiliation and knowledge sharing and gaining.” (Lankshear and Knobel 2018:8)
In the article Lankshear and Knobel introduce two levels of new literacies to grasp the double processes of new literacies as both text production and meaning making and learning processes inherent to the concepts of participatory culture and affinity spaces: the specific level of new literacies and the level of ‘structure’ of new literacies. This way they add a focus on texts and artefacts, resources, modes and modalities, originating from a socio-semiotic view on literacy (Kabel and Storgaard Brok 2018:230-231), to their ethnographic perspective and their interest in new literacy practices as social and cultural practices. And as usual Lankshear and Knobel give examples of the present paradigm (strongest possible) cases of new literacies focusing on both the new technological dimension and the new ethos dimension including a set of competences, strategies, learning strategies and values nurtured and developed in collaborative cultures:
“At a specific level of ‘new literacies’, participants engage in meaning making, mediated by tools and communicated and negotiated as ‘texts’ (i.e., inscribed cultural artifacts), of the kinds involved in pursuing their particular interests and purposes. At the level of the ‘structure’ of new literacies, however, they encounter a profoundly social approach to learning, driven by shared passions, and steeped in collaboration and companionship. And it is this structure that is most important for reforming education: the ‘lesson’ for educators to take from new literacies. In the context of cultural production, the knowledge and understanding and skill and resourcing needed for mastery, participants (learners at all levels) rub shoulders, share values, and offer insider advice on what makes the work ‘good’. And there is seemingly no limit to where this resourcing could come from. There is usually someone ‘there’ to provide an audience and to mutually share and build enthusiasm within the process of learning to be a fanfiction writer, a photoshopper, a music video or spoof movie trailer creator, game designer, etc. Brown and Adler capture much of the educational significance of such ‘social learning’ when they note (2008, p.19) that:
“Mastering a field…involves not only ‘learning about’ the subject matter but also ‘learning to be’ a full participant in the field. This involves acquiring the practices and the norms of established practitioners, in that field or acculturating into a community of practice [or affinity].”” (Lankshear and Knobel 2018:8-9)
‘Learning to be’: challenging the established culture of education
By introducing these double processes of new literacies, Lankshear and Knobel explain more thoroughly what they mean, when they state that in fact ‘the new technical dimension’ challenges the established culture of classroom education, as quoted above: the engagement with participatory culture and affinity spaces includes a move towards social learning. In “Minds on Fire – Open Education, the Long Tail and Learning 2.0” (2008), the article quoted from above by Lankshear and Knobel, Brown and Adler have pointed out that:
“The most profound impact of the Internet, an impact that has yet to be fully realized, is its ability to support and expand the various aspects of social learning. What do we mean by “social learning”? Perhaps the simplest way to explain this concept is to note that social learning is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions. The focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning.” (Brown and Adler 2008:18)
Brown and Adler promote social learning as a contrast to the traditional Cartesian view of knowledge and learning, emphasizing that “…the social view of learning says, “We participate, therefore we are.”(Brown and Adler 2008:18), and adding that “[t]his perspective shifts the focus of our attention from the content of a subject to the learning activities and human interactions around which that content is situated.” (Brown and Adler 2008:18). By placing the Cartesian view of knowledge and learning in contrast to social learning and participation, Brown and Adler align with Anna Sfard’s metaphors for learning as acquisition and as participation, but by contrasting them they seem to deny the complementarity of the two metaphors which is fundamentally important to Sfard, as introduced in The End No 3:1. So somehow Brown and Adler seem to contradict themselves to some extent, as they claimed in the quote above, that mastering a field means both ‘learning about’ a subject matter but also ‘learning to be’ a full participant within a field. And here Lankshear and Knobel follow in Brown and Adler’s footsteps when they promote ‘learning to be’ rather than ‘learning about’ as an essential dimension of new literacies:
“… the ‘structure’ of new literacies provides a basis for moving education away from its traditional form of learning about – content knowledge absorbed from curriculum subjects – toward a model of learning as collaborating producers of knowledge within processes of learning to become ‘kinds of people’ who take on ‘ways of being in the world’. We will argue that what is important for education is not merely finding ways of getting specific ‘new’ literacies, such as digital storytelling, remixing fiction, or programming 3D printers to produce artefacts to our own designs, into classrooms/education – although this might at least be a step in the right direction. Rather the point is to reconstitute education around ‘learning to be’; reorganizing education along the lines James Paul Gee describes in terms of involving people working together to resolve ‘tough problems’ in ways that produce knowledge within social learning processes that are mediated by affinity spaces (Gee, 2013).” (Lankshear and Knobel 2018:7)
‘Learning to be’ as introduced by Brown and Adler – or “becoming a participant” and “belonging, participating, communicating in community building” in Sfard’s terminology – is compatible to communities of practices which are being connected directly to participatory culture and affinity spaces by Lankshear and Knobel as it was already evident when they encircled the participatory forms of a new kind of ethos earlier:
“This is [educational] work that provides opportunities for collaborative production of knowledge and solutions to material as well as ‘academic’ problems rather than continuing to emphasise individualised consumption and assessment of subject area content. It should reflect Gee’s insight that ‘affinity spaces have been, and will be even more in the future, the source of new ideas, new solutions to hard problems, and skills for jobs not yet in existence’ (2013, p.178). It should leverage young people’s experiences of and commitment to the values and satisfactions, derived from their investments in ‘participatory culture’, defined by Jenkins and colleagues in terms of environments and forms of activity where there are
“relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices…[and where] members believe their contributions matter. And feel some degree of social connection with one another (Jenkins et al., 2006, p. 3)”
It is work that meets Gee’s requirement that education
“focus on giving every member of society a valued life and the ability to contribute, to learn how to learn, and to adapt to changing times. It has to create a sense of equality at the level not of status of jobs per se, but at the level of participation in knowledge, innovation, and national and global citizenship for a smarter, safer and better world (2013, p. 205).””(Lankshear and Knobel 2018:11-12)
With affiliation to Gregory Bateson’s and Zygmunt Bauman’s forms of learning, presented in The End No 2, Gee positions education in the context of both citizenship and globalization and change and uncertainty. In his article, “Affinity Spaces and 21st Century Learning” (2017), also referred to by Lankshear and Knobel, Gee describes and defines affinity spaces today as “…often really squishy. They are fluid and ever changing and hard to strictly demarcate.” (Gee 2017:29). In other words, they exist as networks in flux with clusters and weak connections, ever changing and reflecting the complexity and uncertainty of today. And in that sense, Gee’s idea and concept of affinity spaces is being re-defined in accordance with ideas of communities of practice, networks, rhizomes and assemblages introduced in this series and thus supplement the idea and concept of participatory culture in Lankshear and Knobel’s focus on ‘the level of ‘structure’ of new literacies’: “Attending to the structure of new literacies (e.g., participatory culture, social practices, affinity spaces, appreciative systems) necessarily shifts the structure of schooling away from a concern with learning about stuff and towards learning to collaborate, contribute, share, understand, resource, empathise etc. as new ways of learning to be in the world.” (Lankshear and Knobel 2018:15).
The model of ‘new literacy practicies’
It might seem that there has been a slight change in Lankshear and Knobel’s work from their book in 2003 to the article of 2018, sliding from a focus on the current historical period and on new forms of literacies and literacy practices to zooming in on introducing changing literacy practices in teaching and learning in order to educate for the future. But the ideal of social learning has been present all along, accompanying the questions of what currently passes for literacy education, although the reflections on the educational relevance of new literacies are none the less also taking new directions in the 2018-article, “Education and ‘new literacies’ in the middle years”. As Lankshear and Knobel say: “Schools should focus on enabling knowledge and knowhow that middle years youth need but cannot readily access elsewhere – especially by posing what Gee (ibid.) calls ‘tough problems’ that involve working in and across disciplinary areas and engage students with experts beyond the school who can provide useful and important knowledge and insights into the problem being studied. Many of these tough problems will be – ideally – real world, functional or life enhancing problems; problems to be resolved by knowledge and understanding that develop minds within processes of learning to become the kinds of people who meet an ideal of educated persons.” (Lankshear and Knobel 2018:12).
As the context of education is now to create a sense of equality when it comes to participation, knowledge production and innovation, and national and global citizenship “for a smarter, safer, and better better world”, Lankshear and Knobel still emphasize their practice orientation to new literacies by maintaining “…the importance of students producing real knowledge of all kinds by attending to the model of ‘new literacy practices’ rather than simply trying to import new literacies into the classrooms and making them the focal point of learning”, as quoted earlier (Lankshear and Knobel 2018:15). This model of ‘new literacy practices’ can be said to have evolved in time in the shape of a set of concepts and terms that contains the dimensions and the contexts of new literacies, so to speak:
current historical period educational relevance and structure of schooling
post-typographic chronologically new
new technical stuff: new ethos stuff:
skills, tools, enabling, sharing practices, participatory forms
specific level of new literacies: ‘structural’ level of new literacies:
‘texts’, cultural artefacts CoP’s, participatory culture, affinity spaces
textual dimension: social dimension:
text production and meaning making social learning processes
producing knowledge from ‘learn about’ to ‘learning to be’
Like a puzzle picture, new literacies gradually emerge and develop as an approach that includes both a textual and a social dimension, although it is not interested in approaches to textual analysis, interpretation or the like. So although the left column in ‘the model’ above is indispensable, there is no doubt that the right column in ‘the model’ is the heart of the matter. It highlights what is at stake in the model of ‘new literacy practices’: the ideal of social learning and of people working together for collective good and benefit (Lankshear and Knobel 2012:67) in combination with the structure of schooling shifting away “…from a concern with learning about stuff and towards learning to collaborate, contribute, share, understand, resource, empathise etc. as new ways of learning to be in the world.” (Lankshear and Knobel 2018:15).
User productivity and producing knowledge
The practice orientation accentuated by Lankshear and Knobel signals the sociocultural background to their model of ‘new literacy practices’, and as such it is mainly user and production oriented. The perspective regarding texts has moved from the sender to the recipient – but in the sense of seeing the recipient as a user and producer of ‘texts’ within the broader conception of ‘texts’ that new literacies provide. The linear model of communication by Claude Shannon: sender → message → receiver (Hartley 2012:2) is being crossbred with the producer → text/commodity → consumer model (Hartley 2012:9) and transformed into a two-way dialogical model evolved from the altered conditions for communication and participation in digital media and on digital platforms and from the present uses of the internet and digital communication: author/sender/ producer ↔ ‘text’/cultural artefact/product ↔ reader & audience/recipient/user & producer. Now literacy/literacies mean reading and writing as interconnected social and cultural activities and practices, but even with an understanding of reading and writing as production in all kinds of media, modalities and modes, including navigating on the web, as new literacies represent, it leaves the questions of how ‘texts’ and knowledge are understood in the context of a domain, a discipline or a subject matter. Among other things, this calls for dialogical and reception oriented approaches to ‘texts’, meaning making and interpretation, that are able to embrace hypertexts and the networks growing from them, when the communication turns from one-to-many towards many-to-many.
Producing knowledge requires understanding, interpretation, analyzing and seeing the problem or issue concerned in several relevant perspectives, including the historical context of the domain, the discipline or the subject matter, I would suggest. That means knowing its repertoire of ‘texts’ in the broader sense, its practices, and the ways and mechanisms of producing new ’texts’ and actively relate to and take part in the ‘texts’, the repertoire and the knowledge already existing in the domain, the discipline or the subject matter through production, and this way engage in its historicity and in questioning the existing and emerging knowledge. This is crucial and the starting point for participating in and becoming a member of the community of practice and the culture of a domain, a discipline or a subject matter. And it takes social learning, too. In other words, this is what Lankshear and Knobel have called a participatory configuration of ‘the new ethos’.
New literacies have the intention of contributing to the growth of knowledge and learning, and seen in the light of digital media and their present uses, John Hartley mentions in his book, “The uses of digital literacy” (2009), that there is a tendency to self-expression and communication in people’s uses of digital literacy in informal contexts and everyday practices, but also that: “…there is more to language than self-expression and communication: there is also knowledge.” (Hartley 2009:137). Hartley suggests that this tendency has to be acted on and the uses of digital literacy have to be elaborated and developed to meet the requirements for producing knowledge. While discussing digital storytelling he takes up Karl Popper’s levels of language in his argument:
“In fact, the philosopher Karl Popper (1972) has produced a typology of the ‘levels’ of language:
- Self-expression
- Communication
- Description
- Argument…
For Popper, the first two levels produce subjective knowledge, the second two can lead to objective knowledge. For us, it is noteworthy that digital storytelling, in common with the media-entertainment complex in general, is obsessively focused on the first level. To take a further step toward the two ‘higher’ levels of language, the question of expertise needs to be expressed: how can everyone in a given community be in a position to contribute to the growth of objective knowledge?” (Hartley 2009:137-138)
So as a precondition for knowledge production, subjective understandings need to be connected and related to explicit and validated ‘objective’ knowledge. On the other hand, Hartley still stresses, that “With the internet and digital communication, mediated communication had been restored to a two-way dialogic model in which everyone is understood as productive.” (Hartley 2012:22). This opens up to questions about what defines knowledge and who defines what kinds of knowledge are needed. And as a kind of counterpart to Bonnie Stewart’s opening quote from Lankshear and Knobel, Hartley comments on the current state of the internet and its affordances:
“Like printing, the internet was invented for instrumental purposes (security, scholarship), but it has rapidly escaped such intentions and is evolving new ‘affordances’ unlooked for a mere decade ago. The most important change is that the structural asymmetry between producers and consumers, experts and amateurs, writers and readers has begun to rebalance. In principle (if not yet in practice), everyone can publish as well as ‘read’ mass media. Users play an important role in making the networks, providing the services, improving the products, forming the communities, and producing the knowledge that characterize digital media. We are entering an era of user productivity, not expert representation. It is now possible to think of consumers as agents, sometimes enterprises, and to see in consumer-created content and user-led innovation not further exploitation by the expert representatives but rather ‘consumer entrepreneurship’ (once a contradiction in terms).
Once again, as was the case for print in early modern Europe, a means of communication has become an agent as well as a carrier of change, extending the capabilities of the publisher across social and geographical boundaries and producing unintended consequences that have hardly begun to be exploited.“ (Hartley 2012:25)
What to think about the question of expertise clashing with the affordances of the internet and digital communication, then? John Hartley’s double perspective on digital media and the internet both meets and challenges the intentions new literacies have to contribute to the growth of knowledge when they focus on changing literacy practices in teaching and learning in schools – challenges where Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel’s ‘philosophy of education’ can be said to frame their view on ‘the stuff’ that knowledge is made of in a digital age – and that includes both self-expression, communication, description and argument after all.
A philosophy of education
Lankshear and Knobel seem to be about to make a move beyond the affordances of Web 2.0 and the architecture of participation, or maybe rather they are in the move to build on top of these affordances, providing their thinking with new layers of ethics and the present horizon of Web 3.0 and so forth, on the grounds of the critical-evaluative accounts provided by Gee. Gee touches on both kinds introduced earlier: the sound and fair judgement of the educational relevance of particular new literacies and a critical evaluation of what is efficacy learning seen from a curriculum and pedagogical perspective, as quoted above: “[Education] has to create a sense of equality at the level not of status of jobs per se, but at the level of participation in knowledge, innovation, and national and global citizenship for a smarter, safer and better world (2013, p. 205).” (Lankshear and Knobel 2018:12).
As their way of answering the questions of what education is for and what education is about in this perspective, Lankshear and Knobel supplement Gee’s requirement for education with four dimensions of human development and wellbeing that make up their ‘philosophy of education’ by now:
- Knowledge and building minds:
“By ‘mind’ we mean a combination of cognitive capacity and certain kinds of attitudes, such as a concern for relevance, impartiality, being reasonable, and so on. It is about knowing when information is relevant to a question or issue in ways that mean it counts as valid evidence, and about being willing to weigh evidence on its merits, rather than on the basis of our preferences. It is the willingness to follow arguments where the evidence leads, in order to make the best quality judgements about the matter in question. It is to do with caring enough about our thinking to get it as clear and logical and elegant as we can. It involves appreciating the values and criteria and ways of evaluating and judging within an area of activity and respecting them up to the point where it is reasonable and appropriate to modify them… It involves creating opportunities for learners to develop these values within contexts of acquiring and actively producing knowledge about things, that matter for their lives and the lives of others.” (Lankshear and Knobel 2018:9)
- Becoming ethical persons and kind and decent members of our communities:
“The role of formal education institutions is, we believe, different. It is about providing opportunities for young people to understand and experience what it means to develop and act on principles rather than to follow rules and simply obey authority. Acting on principles comprises opportunities to reflect ethically: to move beyond rules and to consider the ‘whys’ that lie behind them, and to develop a strong sense of caring for the principles in question. One way of thinking about this is in terms of coming to understand persons and communities as systems that have their integrity…While schools cannot ensure that learners in fact do come to care about this, and develop respect for all persons, they can and should – as learning institutions – provide social learning opportunities for conceiving ‘bigger pictures’ and grasping ethical concepts through conversation and experiences.” (Lankshear and Knobel 2018:10)
- Learning to become ‘stewards of the universe’:
“We believe that a parallel argument holds with respect to our place in the universe, within the ‘larger order’ of things. Our humanity enables us both to grasp the totality of everything that exists as a complex and interconnected system and to appreciate the complexity and interconnectedness of that system and to respect its integrity. There is no argument to prove that we should do this. Rather, we believe, that perhaps the greatest outcome of an education is to be capable of expressing appreciation of and respect for the integrity of ‘wonderful things’ – as something we do for its own sake, not (merely) because doing so maximizes our chances of survival (which, of course, it does)…” (Lankshear and Knobel 2018:10)
- Caring for our personal integrity:
“While it is absolutely possible to attain wellbeing on the basis of intuition, habit, and imitation, a good education can enhance awareness and appreciation of the importance of caring for the integrity of our selves as part of a larger dialectic of caring for others and our communities and our world. For us, this is all about providing learners with the wherewithal to help themselves keep body, mind and spirit nurtured and healthy – and developing a very real commitment to their own and others’ wellbeing…The first thing required of formal education in terms of building the disposition to respect and care for personal integrity is to optimize opportunities to experience genuine success in meaningful forms of learning. This is not about ‘passing’ work that is inadequate. Rather, it involves re-organising learning in ways that reflect the ‘structure’ of social practices of new literacies understood as contexts for social learning, collaborative engagement, and membership in participatory culture…” (Lankshear and Knobel 2018:10-11).
This almost manifest-like ‘philosophy of education’ both elaborates on and replaces the ‘ideal’ frame for understanding the character and role of new literacies that is closing Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel’s article “New literacies: technologies and values” (2012:67).
Anna Sfard’s participation metaphor and her point that “[t]he vocabulary of participation brings the message of togetherness, solidarity and collaboration” (Sfard 1998:8) are more or less embedded in this ‘philosophy of education’ and thus in the definition of ‘the new ethos stuff’/‘a new kind of ethos’ combined with the idea of communities of practice, participatory culture and affinity spaces. Ethos is concerned in how people act and interact within a community or culture and in the norms, the values and the attitudes they are socialized into or ought to be involved with due to their personal integrity. Aristoteles coined three aspects of establishing ethos: 1) showing kindness and good-will towards your audience, 2) having a high standard of morality, and 3) being competent and qualified within your domain (Bergstrøm 2015: 311-312). With the terms ‘the new ethos stuff’/‘a new kind of ethos’, new literacies seem to draw on Aristoteles while foregrounding the aspect of showing kindness and good-will towards other connections and participants, although not neglecting the other two, to stress that new literacies are more participatory, collaborative and distributed than conventional literacy. Being focused on social learning, on relationships, connections and networks requires both a high moral standard and being competent and qualified within one’s domain, discipline and subject matter. And that is still worth favouring according to Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel and their ‘philosophy of education’, although they are now also embracing Web 3.0, ‘smart’-concepts and the Internet of Things when they pitch upon the examples of an online global project hub and of youth making ‘smart’ athletic wear in a workshop and makerspace.
Characterizing what they see as the qualities about humans, about things, about the world and about humanity, Lankshear and Knobel value the good, the true and the beautiful in their ‘philosophy of education’. It almost seems like an aspiration for Bildung. They advocate for understanding oneself, ‘the other’ and the world in ways that correspond to the idea of ‘digital Bildung’ (Drotner 2018:9) – a much debated concept – that inform the definition of digital literacy by Martin and Grudziecki in The End No 3:1. Seeing digital tools and facilities as part of a whole life, they build on Morten Søby when they introduce ‘digital Bildung’ as a founding concept for digital literacy:
“”Digital bildung expresses a more holistic understanding of how children and youths learn and develop their identity. In addition, the concept encompasses and combines the way in which skills, qualifications, and knowledge are used. As such, digital bildung suggests an integrated, holistic approach that enables reflection on the effects that ICT has on different aspects of human development: communicative competence, critical thinking skills, and enculturation processes, among others. (Søby, 2003:8)”
Søby uses the german term Bildung to suggest the integrated development of the individual as a whole person. The processes of Bildung goes on throughout life, affects all aspects of the individual’s thought and activity, and affects understandings, interpretations, beliefs, attitudes and emotions as well as actions. It represents the making of the individual both as a unique individual and as a member of a culture.” (Martin and Grudziecki 2006:255)
Within the framework of digital literacy development
Lankshear and Knobel’s model of ‘new literacy practices’ aligns with and works on all three levels of Martin and Grudziecki’s model of digital literacy development introduced in The End No 3:1. ‘Skills’ and ‘practices’ are equivalent to the ideas of ‘the new technical stuff’/the new technical dimension and ‘the new ethos stuff’/a new kind of ethos, and with their definition of a practice orientation to new literacies Lankshear and Knobel turn more directly toward common grounds with the model for digital development: ‘skills’ and ‘practices’ align with the levels of digital competences and digital usage in Martin and Grudziecki’s model. The level of digital competence gets a more modest discussion in Lankshear and Knobel’s writings, though, as the model of ‘new literacy practices’ especially works at the levels of digital usage and digital transformation.
Digital usage involves “…using digital tools to seek, find and process information and then to develop a product or solution addressing the task or problem” in a specific situation and a specific context (Martin and Grudziecki 2006:258), but within the community of practice of a domain, a discipline or a subject matter. And it is with the important addition, that the result of a specific digital usage “…will itself be the trigger for further action in the life context.” (Martin and Gruziecki 2006:258). Knowing is coming to the front in the shape of knowledge processes. This indicates that a community of practice is not just to be seen as a stable ‘entity’ and culture, building solely on trajectories leading from ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ to ‘full participation’, a view McLoughlin and Lee represent as quoted in The End No 2. Instead a community of practice is to be seen as both stable and dynamic and interacting with the world through networks, as both Lankshear and Knobel and Etienne Wenger-Trayner have emphasized, and thus it is representing a dialogical view on learning. Learning through ‘doing’, ‘making’ and ‘being in action’ is being supplemented by learning through ‘productivity’, including ‘producing knowledge’ and ‘knowledge creation’, so “[d]igital usage becomes embedded within the understandings and actions which evolve within the community and cause the community itself to evolve: the community of practice is thus also a community of learning.” (Martin and Grudziecki 2006: 257-258). To Lankshear and Knobel that applies to participatory culture and affinity spaces, too.
This is not just a link to the level of digital transformation, “…achieved when the digital usages which have been developed enable innovation and creativity, and stimulate significant change within the professional or knowledge domain.” (Martin and Grudziecki 2006:259), but it also makes a link to the model of ‘new literacy practices’. Here social learning, knowledge production and creative innovation merge together and support the ontological sense of ‘new’ and its focus on change that was the starting point for Lankshear and Knobel.
To be continued…
Further reading:
Bergstrøm, Ditte Maria (2015): Online retorik, Christiansen, H-C. og Rose, G. B. (red.): Online kommunikation, København: Hans Reitzels Forlag, 301-329
Brown, John Seely and Adler, Richard P. (2008): Minds on Fire. Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0, Educause Review, January/February, 17-32
Drotner, Kirsten (2018): Hvad er digital dannelse og hvordan fremmer skolen den?, Unge Pædagoger Årg. 79, nr. 2, 6-14
Gee, James Paul (2017): Affinity Spaces and 21st Century Learning, Educational Technology, 57 No 2, 27-31
Hartley, John (2012): Digital Futures for Cultural and Media Studies, Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons
Hartley, John (2009): The uses of digital literacy, St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press
Kabel, Kristine og Storgaard Brok, Lene (2018): Didaktik og kontekst – vi trænger til en teoretisk afklaring af kontekstbegrebet i literacy-didatikken, Christensen, T. S., Elf, N., Hobel, P., Qvortrup, A. og Troelsen, S. (red.): Didaktik i udvikling, Aarhus: Klim
Knobel, Michele and Kalman, Judith (Eds.)(2016): New Literacies and Teacher Learning. Professional Development and the Digital Turn, New York: Peter Lang
Knobel, Michele and Lankshear, Colin (2014): Studying New Literacies, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 58 (2), 97-101, DOI: 10.1002/jaal.314
Lankshear, Colin and Knobel, Michele (2018): Education and ‘new literacies’ in the middle years, Literacy Learning: the Middle Years, Vol. 26 No 2, 7-16
Lankshear, Colin and Knobel, Michele (2012): ’New’ literacies: technologies and values, Revista Teknokultura, (2012), Vol. 9 Núm 1, 45-69
Lankshear, Colin and Knobel, Michele (2003): New Literacies: Changing Knowledge and Classroom Learning, Buckingham: Open University Press
Martin, Allan and Jan Grudziecki (2006): DigEuLit: Concepts and Tools for Digital Literacy Development, Innovation in Teaching and Learning in Information and Computer Sciences, 5:4,249-267, DOI:10.11120/ital.2006.05040249
McLoughlin, Catherine and Lee, Mark J.W. (2008): The Three P’s of Pedagogy for the Networked Society: Personalization, Participation, and Productivity, International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, Volume 20, Number 1, 10-27
Sfard, Anna (1998): On Two Metaphors for Learning and the Dangers of Choosing Just One, Educational Researcher, March 1998, 4-13
Stewart, Bonnie (2013): Massiveness + Openness = New Literacies of Participation? , MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and teaching Vol. 9, No.2, June 2013, 228-238
Elna Mortensen
Photo by WeMake Milano on Flickr – CC BY-NC-SA
After quite some time of thinking, this is a summing up and an elaboration on some of the issues that have been under scrutiny in my explorations in this series of blog posts. It represents a recursive process, or maybe a matter of bricolage, as it reveals itself in four parts that can be read as one fairly short piece and three quite long pieces with pauses in between, or as a genuinely long read tuning in on 1) pedagogies in an era of knowledge abundance, 2) learning modes and a posthuman perspective, 3) the state of participatory culture and digital literacies, and 4) knowledge management and learning for and from the future.
“What does a pedagogy of abundance look like?”, I asked in part one of this little series of blog posts following in the footsteps of Martin Weller’s article “A pedagogy of abundance” (2011). I suggested that rhizomatic learning might be such a pedagogy of abundance, a pedagogy based on a multiplicity of theories of learning: social constructivism, connectivism, and communities of practice that are combined into a situative and social learning approach. ‘Community’ and ‘networks’ are equally important to Dave Cormier’s conception of rhizomatic learning, and this is my continuing investigation of how rhizomatic learning can be evaluated as a pedagogy of abundance. Rhizomatic learning fits into an era of knowledge abundance: a world of complexity where knowledge is emergent, contingent and contextual, and a world where a move from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 has its focus on connecting knowledge.
Small Blog On Networked Learning 