Jason Ohler talks looks at changes in literacy, digital storytelling and the challenges and opportunities for teaching in New-Media Literacies: Don’t be so text-centric; experiment with the media technologies your students use
Being literate in a real-world sense means being able to read and write using the media forms of the day, whatever they may be. For centuries, consuming and producing words through reading and writing and, to a lesser extent, listening and speaking were sufficient. But because of inexpensive, easy-to-use, and widely available new tools, literacy now requires being conversant with new forms of media as well as text, including sound, graphics, and moving images. In addition, it demands the ability to integrate these new media forms into a single narrative, or “media collage,” such as a Web page, blog, or digital story.
The capabilities and options provided by the social help expand communication from an outward facing solitary broadcast to a community, collaborative exercise.
Since the advent of the Web, expression has shifted toward including social, rather than strictly individual, kinds of communication. Traditional essays remain vitally important, but they now co-exist with new media within the context of a “social web,” often referred to as Web 2.0, which permits collaborative narrative construction and publication through blogs and services like MySpace, Google Docs, and YouTube.
He incorporates these new ideas into the classroom by having students manage blogfolios and create two multimedia presentations.