Week Five- Article Review

Here is the link to an interesting article entitled  "Tomorrow will not be like today": Literacy and identity in a word of multiliteracies. I chose this article because it speaks about the shift occurring in literacy education practices for adolescents and how the prevalence of online life for teens alters issues of identity. It also talks about the new challenges both the students and we as educators face now and will face in the future.  The most interesting component of this article to me was the ways in which technology allows people to "manipulate and play with their identities".  They can now create an online persona that be greatly different from their actual "in-person" self.

 Also, the article touches on the fact that though many express concern for the amount of time teens spend online,  the interactive nature of online life and the amount of reading and writing they do shows how exaggerated this concern may be. Not only are they not socially isolated, they are interacting for hours and hours with different people in a variety of different social and educational contexts.

Though my son spends hours online in the evening, I observe him doing his homework in collaboration with friends, completing group multimedia projects online, researching for an essay and papers, studying for his drivers permit and blogging; and at the same time he is instant messaging on facebook or uploading photos to Gimp for editing to post to his blog. This is the way life is for teens and there is no turning back.

 If we engage our students in conversations and ask them to show us what they read and write online, we can discover what they may have learned about traditional literacy concepts. If we create places for students to work online, we engage them in a way that is familiar to them and works in the social realm that they are used to working in. We can certainly engage them in traditional practices of reading and writing and new literacy in the areas of media content, networking, negotiating of social contexts and in working with multiple media, as stated in the article.

Okay, here is the link. Please let me know what you think!
http://igenlit.pbworks.com/f/williams%20multiliteracies.pdf


Here is the DropBox link:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/58663120/Language%20Arts%20and%20Technology/Week%205/williams%20multiliteracies-1.pdf