Week One: Literacies as a Social Practice

"The distinctive contribution of the approach to literacy as social practice lies in the ways in which it involves careful and sensitive attention to what people do with texts, how they make sense of them and use them to further their own purposes in their own learning lives" (Gillen and Barton, 2010, p. 9).”

I often refer to technology as Jekyll and Hyde in a digital non-human form. I feel as though now that I have it, now that I utilize it and now that I have essentially become addicted to it in terms of not even noticing how often I utilize it; especially in a social media aspect. I want to hold onto it much like Gollum wants the ring. Technology especially in terms of social media and digital literacy when it comes to communicating has essentially become my “precious”. I feel as though this is the case for much of society or at least those who utilize different digital apps and platforms on a daily basis. However, along with it’s regular usage it displays factors that are both good and evil. We are able to communicate on many platforms to just about anyone, anywhere, at anytime. We are able to receive mass amounts of information with a simple search. We are also exposed to almost anyone; information is shared quickly, vastly and relentlessly. We have fewer in depth conversations and many more that are surface level. We have become accustomed to dismissal, and even more accustomed to the instant gratification of a search as opposed to research. We communicate sometimes in rants, sometimes directly and often times when we are driven by emotion. Most of the aforementioned goes hand in hand with social media and daily digital and technological interactions.

However, if we explore digital literacy in a learning environment we tend to meet restrictions; partly based on the lack of materials generally thanks to funding and partly based on the resistance to step away from the traditional processes to leap into the ever changing and evolving and sometimes complicated digital world. According to Lankshear and Knobel, “schooling operates on the presumption that the teacher is the ultimate authority on matters of knowledge and learning. Hence, whatever is addressed and done in the classroom must fall within the teacher’s competence parameters since he or she is to direct learning.” (Literacies, 2011, p. 190) This is something I personally no longer recognize as truth, thanks to digital practices I feel as though teachers have become one of many sources of information and is no longer the only direct link to learning nor the actual director of learning. This generally applies to anyone in a training or teaching capacity, we may teach, we may train but we certainly feel a slip in direct information sharing as there always seems to be an alternative go-to that requires very little research.

We have always had various ways in which we could express and share our works and thoughts. Whether it is through formal grammar or visual components such as a drawing or image we have a multitude of platforms to lend to our individual expression and description(s) of a topic. We are no longer forced to only communicate in only formal application, in a learning environment we still do certainly have tradition expectations through a percentage of assignments, but we are also encouraged to utilize other ways to communicate via various texts and outlets of choice. This class is an example in that we were encouraged to create a blog to create and share a more traditional assignment. We encountered a visual task merged with something more formal. Everyone for the most part has added visual appeal to their blog or an identity, by doing so they have communicated something about themselves. This form of visual communication may go unnoticed, we may not put much thought on a color combination selection, a choice of font or a background image; however as we move forward and learn more about one another we will see the reasoning for the selections we have made. We have communicated to one another something about ourselves without saying a single word. We did this without being taught how to do it; we were just directed to do it.

In reading the works of Kress and Van Leeuwen, I stumbled upon a section speaking about Roland Barthes and an essay he wrote in 1964 called Rhetoric of the Image, in which he argued that, “the meaning of images (and of other semiotic codes, like dress, food, etc.) is always related to and, in a sense dependent on, verbal text. By themselves, images are, he thought, too ‘polysemous’, too open to a variety of possible meanings” (Kress and Leeuwen, 2006, p18). I would agree in the sense that an image can be interpreted differently by each individual viewing it, however I do think that we have the ability to come to some pretty solid explanations without the need for formal text to describe what we are seeing in every situation. For instance if someone created a light blue blog, with a dark blue font I would know, not assume that they like the color blue; I would not have to rely on the blogs creator to formally write out that they have an affinity for blue. There are some many instances now during this digital age where we can write very little formally and yet speak full sentences visually!

Kress, Gunther R., and Theo Van Leeuwen. "Chapter 1/The Semiotic Landscape." Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge, 2006. 18. Print.

Lankshear, Colin, and MichelecHAPTER Knobel. "Chapter 10/The "New Literacy Studies"" Literacies: Social, Cultural and Historical Perspectives. New York: Peter Lang, 2011. 190. Print.