New Literacy in a Web 2.0 World

Literacy in a post-digital revolutionary age crosses multiple media boundaries. In order for the coming generation of Web users and consumers to successfully navigate competing interests successfully, this generation of teachers must properly model sophisticated Web use and instruct students in "reading" the diversity of Web content.

In his chapter "What It All Means," Richardson identifies several ways in which the Read/Write Web has shifted communicating information, educating students, and defining learning.¹ Among those he lists, a few of them struck me as most important for classroom teachers to consider.

Modeling

Richardson very pointedly asserts that "to teach these technologies effectively, educators must learn to use them effectively."² This is so true as to seem unnecessary to state, but there are many teachers who feel like students should somehow already understand blogs and wikis without understanding these technologies themselves. Teachers can only teach about these technologies with confidence once they have learned about them through use and great familiarity. In any content area, like history or mathematics, people naturally assume the teacher should have an intimate grasp of the content. When it comes to the Web, however, many teachers simply assume that students already understand. Even worse, this leads to thinking that they, the teachers, do not need to become more than casual users and consumers. It is incumbent on educators to model Web content creation for students.

Where Over What

Another shift Richardson identifies is the importance of knowing where to find good information and teachers instead of memorizing that information.³ I chuckled when I read this, because it does not strike me as a shift; my grandmother used to tell me in the early 90s that knowing where to find the answers was just as good as knowing the answer from memory. She kept an impressive library in her small house. Where Richardson points out a shift in this, nevertheless, is in the proliferation of contributors to the Web since the advent of Web 2.0. The ever-growing numbers of those publishing information to the Internet means that there are more ways for a student to become confused or misled in his or her search for reliable information and quality instruction. Teachers must demonstrate and instruct students in the methods for finding Web sources they can trust and how to discriminate between reliable and unreliable sources. This should be part of curriculum despite department and discipline. Educators need to be intentional in teaching students to 'read' the Web for quality of information.

Multi-literate Students

Although Richardson points out many other useful areas for teacher attention, the last I found most pertinent to my classroom was his section about the multimedia nature of writing in a Web 2.0 world. As he states, "We can write in audio and video, in music, and in digital photographs, and even in code such as Javascript, ans we can publish all of it easily for extended audiences."⁴ This means that students will need to know how to 'read' images on the web (http://knowyourmeme.com/). Additionally, educators should equip students with an understanding of visual rhetoric so they will recognize the ways film and video producers appeal to them throw film and sound. This level of 'reading' content on the Web strengthens future Web to become sophisticated contributors to the Web and well-informed consumers.

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1 Richarson, W. (2006) Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. ^↩
2 ibid. 132-3. ^↩
3 ibid. 129-30. ^↩
4 ibid. 131. ^↩