3 Core Literacies for Effective Teaching and Learning | W8 Q1 | Discussion

New literacies is an expansive field of study that intersects across disciplines ranging from information technology to critical media studies (Tierney, 2009). I have distilled the types of literacies that I consider to be most relevant for teacher-scholars into the following typologies:

1. “Multimodal/Multimedia literacy”: this type of literacy refers to one’s fluency in being able to design and communicate effectively using multimedia/multimodal elements. As a 21st century teacher, the ability to select the appropriate medium (which platform) to craft the message and to determine appropriate modalities (levels of interactivity/engagement) to display the message is an essential skillset. Multimodal/multimedia literacy encompasses general design principles (Mayer, 2004) for specific media but extends to an ability to fluidly communicate across various media and modalities.

2. “Informational Hypermedia Literacy”: this type of literacy refers to one’s reading and writing abilities for informational purposes in ill-structured, open domains (Spiro, 1990) such as the Internet. This type of literacy, emphasized in school and work-related practices, enables one to effectively navigate, comprehend (Coiro & Dobler, 2007), and synthesize informational media.

3. “New Media Literacy”: this type of literacy refers ability to develop and utilize new media to create tools/objects-to-think-with (LOGO coding program, video cases, hypertext journals, etc.) that extend learning beyond the affordances of traditional media (Spiro, Collins, and Ramchandran, 2007).

I consider these literacies to be most relevant because they capture the range of skillsets that would directly impact one’s ability to construct and disseminate information in a way that embraces the multifaceted avenues of communication enabled by technology.

• Coiro, J., & Dobler, E. (2007). Exploring the online reading comprehension strategies used by sixth-grade skilled readers to search for and locate information on the Internet. Reading Research Quarterly, 42 (2), 214-257.
• Tierney, R. J. (2009). Shaping new literacies research: Extrapolations from a review of the Handbook on research on New Literacies. Reading Research Quarterly, 44 (3), 322-339.
• Rich, M. (2008, July 27). Literacy debate: Online R U really reading? The New York Times. Retrieved from http://wwww.nytimes.com