EDU 3610 New Media Literacies & Culture

This course will explore new media technologies and literacies prevalent in contemporary culture and of increasing importance in educational contexts. An array of new media technologies and emergent literacies will be explored theoretically, critically, and through hands-on applications in order to consider their pedagogical, curricular, and sociocultural implications.

What does it mean to ‘be literate’ today? Over the past decades, we have witnessed revolutionary sociotechnical transformations in media environments and in everyday social, communicative, and creative practices. This course will explore the cultural implications and educational possibilities of new media, unpacking and critically exploring an array of new terms: multiliteracies, multimodal literacies, digital literacies, design literacies, and critical literacy.

New media have, in diverse ways, outpaced formal schooling systems: the challenge for educators to ‘keep up with’ and theorize these new tools and environments has become a central goal of teacher education in Ontario (and worldwide). As many educational researchers have emphasized, our current generation of learners find themselves in a substantially different technical and cultural situation than students of just a decade or two ago. A constellation of different buzz words have been applied to these learners, including ‘screen generation’, ‘digital natives’, ‘millennials’, ‘net gen’, and so on. These terms commonly signal that today’s children have grown up learning very differently than those of past generations – and that schools must address the changing literacies required to participate in 21^st Century cultural and political practices – including novel forms of digitally-mediated sociality, work, civic/political action, and play.

To this end, New Media Literacies and Culture explores the evolving shapes, sites and uses of literacy – as expressed in contemporary media practices. The stakes our discussions go beyond technical innovation and educational practice to address important questions about participation, equality, and democracy — and the creative capacity of anyone — in an increasingly networked society.