E-Learning and Digital Media |
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Volume 6 Number 3 2009 |
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Other issues available | Journal home page | Publisher home page | |||
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CONTENTS [click on author's name for abstract and full text] | |||
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SPECIAL ISSUE
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New Media, New Literacies and the Adolescent Learner |
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JANETTE HUGHES Faculty of Education, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Canada |
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doi:10.2304/elea.2009.6.3.259 |
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The goal of this research study was to develop a conceptualization of the relationship between new digital media and adolescent students’ writing of poetry while immersed in using new media. More specifically, the research focused on the performative affordances of new media and how these interacted with the students’ creative processes as they created digital poems. The article examines eight themes that emerged during the study, including the multimodal, multilinear and collaborative nature of the poems, the role of audience and identity in the creative process, and the shifting views of poetry the students experienced. |
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Theatre of the Mind: a project to animate the language of thought and communication |
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doi:10.2304/elea.2009.6.3.272 |
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Human language is a rich and complex part of human behaviour that can be studied in many ways. The author and his colleagues are developing an application that accepts simple texts as input and presents an animated display of characters acting out the text. It mimics the human visualization of texts, the so-called Theatre of the Mind. In so doing, they need an integrated theory of language; they can test such a theory for consistency and completeness because it is implemented in computable form. In practice, they may have the basis for a useful tool for developing literacy or second-language teaching. By entering expressions, learners can see what the expressions mean and so learn, in a constructive dialogue, some of the language-specific features that they need to master. |
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Glocalization, Representation and Literacy Education |
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HEATHER LOTHERINGTON Faculty of Education, York University, Toronto, Canada |
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doi:10.2304/elea.2009.6.3.274 |
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This article uses a comic program to graphically summarize a collaborative action research project that brings together York University researchers and elementary school teachers at Joyce Public School in northwest Toronto to experimentally develop multiliteracies pedagogies in a context of emergent literacy education. The project, which has been continuously developing since 2003, searches for ways of socializing both children and teachers into new literacies in the primary and junior grades from a grassroots perspective that operates within the constraints of the modern political machinery that organizes formal education. The teacher-researchers who work in this community of practice carve out preferred trajectories for new literacies action research through narrative projects, focusing on perspectives such as playing with the myriad junctures between and across alphabetic page and iconic screen; creating dynamic textual representations; including community languages towards globally focused linguistic learning; and creating multiple representations of a narrative thread across language, genre, and culture. We work collaboratively to bridge theory and practice using a blended model that includes regular face-to-face workshops. Now an online workspace, and in its seventh year of consecutive funding, the project is moving into ludic approaches to multimodal literacy education through gaming. |
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Leveraging New Technologies for Professional Learning in Education: digital literacies as culture shift in professional development |
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JANET MURPHY ABEL
Program, York University, Canada |
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doi:10.2304/elea.2009.6.3.275 |
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Providing just-in-time job-embedded professional learning using a technologically mediated model achieves professional growth goals and encourages teachers to build digital literacy competencies and incorporate new technologies in instructional approaches in the classroom. This article highlights the lessons learned from an award-winning professional learning program developed by the Advanced Broadband Enabled Learning program (ABEL), a Research and Innovation initiative at York University in Toronto, Canada. Ongoing research into this program reveals that teachers who are learning via technologies refine their understanding of digital literacy, and develop curriculum designs and instructional strategies that facilitate differentiated instruction through digitally mediated designs, increase student engagement in learning, and improve student achievement. |
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Educational Perspectives on Digital Communications Technologies |
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doi:10.2304/elea.2009.6.3.281 |
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This article examines key issues in how new technologies are impacting upon how we teach, learn and collaborate, and uses an educational research project called GRAIL (Graduate Researcher’s Academic Identity Online) under development to illustrate some fundamental issues in adopting new technologies. A significant challenge to the effective use of new technologies in education is the evolution of social practices around those technologies and the discrepancies between broader social uses of new technologies and how those same technologies can be used in educational contexts. The article describes challenges to design along the dimensions of public/private and individual/collaborative and uses data from a series of project research studies to illustrate the nature of these challenges and possible solutions. The taking up of new technologies in new ways requires the evolution of social practices of use – these practices simultaneously reflect and change our culture, and the evolution of such processes takes time. |
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