Jisc Digital Literacy Webinar: Textual Practices in the New Media Digital Landscape - Messing with Digital Literacies

 Registration is closed for this event

Materials from the session are now available from the ALT Repository.

This webinar is based on a paper due to appear in a special issue of the Journal of Research in Learning Technology, arising from the significant, exhilarating but sometimes also uneasy and difficult conversations across disciplinary areas that are provoked when scholars researching digital learning technologies meet those working from a literacy studies tradition. These conversations are part of the effort to understand the significant shifts in practices of communication, learning and meaning-making that are currently taking place.

In the session Mary Hamilton, Mary Lea and Lesley Gourlay will review some key differences, tensions, problematics and debates between the two traditions of literacies and learning technologies research. They will marshal arguments about the importance of looking carefully at how these two traditions intersect and what each brings to our understanding of learning and meaning-making. They will suggest that the key elements from the critical theoretical tradition of literacy studies should be integral to discussions of new media and new learning. Further, the terms "literacy" (and "literacies") need to be carefully reconsidered in relation to these discussions since it is constantly being parted from its root meanings and used in multiple, confusing ways.

About the presenters

Mary Hamilton is Professor of Adult Learning and Literacy in the Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University, UK and teaches there on a Doctoral Programme in E-Research and Technology Enhanced learning. Her research explores communication and interaction in the everyday textually-mediated social world and involves close analysis of how texts, both print and digital, are used within social encounters and how texts circulate within institutional settings. She is interested in informal learning across the lifespan and also in the globalisation processes of educational policy. See her full profile at http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/centres/tel/profiles/mary-hamilton

Mary R Lea is Reader in Academic and Digital Literacies at the Open University. Both her research and practice are concerned with writing, knowledge and meaning-making in a wide range of HE contexts, including the digital landscape. She is interested in the way that technologies have become aligned uncritically with literacy in order to promote dominant institutional agendas (Lea 2013a). She offers a counter to this in a reappraisal of academic literacies research in the digital university, exploring its potential in relation to a network perspective ( Lea 2013b)

References
Lea, M R (2013) Reclaiming literacies: competing textual practices in a digital higher education, Teaching in Higher Education 18 (1) 106-118
Lea, M R (2013) Academic literacies in the digital university: integrating individual accounts with network practice Literacy in the Digital University: critical perspectives on learning, scholarship, and technology New York/London: London

Lesley Gourlay is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literacies and Director of the Academic Writing Centre at the Institute of Education. Her background is in Applied Linguistics, and her research interests include academic literacies, trajectories of staff and students, internationalisation and widening participation in HE, and the implications of digital mediation for the contemporary university. Lesley is also interested in developing pedagogic models of writing development in Higher Education, and in uses of writing in the curriculum.

About the series

This seminar series is funded by the JISC IOE Digital Literacy project, and will be hosted by ALT. It will explore the themes of the forthcoming special issue of Research in Learning Technology, which will focus on Digital Literacies and Digital Scholarship. The authors of four of the papers in the special issue will present on their research and theoretical perspectives surrounding these themes.  The series will be curated by Lesley Gourlay (joint editor of RLT) and Special Issue guest editors Martin Oliver and Norm Friesen. Sessions will involve presentation, exploration of themes by the facilitators and open discussion with participants.

The webinar will be run using Blackboard Collaborate 11. We will notify you of arrangements approximately three days prior to the webinar, giving you time to get your PC or Mac set up and tested, taking account of the guidance on the ALT web site at http://www.alt.ac.uk/events/webinar-faqs.

When
5 Dec 2013 from 11:00 AM to  1:00 PM
Location
Online
United Kingdom