New Media Literacies
This course serves as an in-depth look at literacy theory in media contexts, from its origins in ancient Greece to its functions and changes in the current age of digital media, participatory cultures, and technologized learning environments. Students will move quickly through traditional historical accounts of print literacies; the majority of the semester will focus on treating literacy as more than a functional skill (i.e., one's ability to read and write) and instead as a sophisticated set of meaning-making activities situated in specific social spaces. These new media literacies include the practices and concepts of: fan fiction writing, online social networking, videogaming, appropriation and remixing, transmedia navigation, multitasking, performance, distributed cognition, and collective intelligence. Assignments include weekly reading and writing assignments and an original research project. Readings will include Plato, Goody and Watt, Scribner and Cole, Graff, Brandt, Heath, Lemke, Gee, Alvermann, Jenkins, Hobbs, Pratt, Leander, Dyson, Levy, Kress, and Lankshear and Knobel.
Staff：
Instructor:
Dr. Alice Robison
WEEK &TOPIC：
1-2
Introduction to new media literacies
Where is media literacy headed? What's at stake?
3
Origins of literacy in the west
Where does literacy come from? Where is it found?
4
Literacy and the media
How is literacy portrayed in media and schools? What is the "literacy myth"?
5
Learning week
Forums; Photoshop and image editing
6
New literacies and new media, part 1
What are the new literacy studies? What do they have to do with media?
7
New literacies and new media, part 2
8
Multimodality
What counts as a text in the new media literacies?
9
Learning week
Animation; Podcasting
10
Learning week
11
Situated learning
Wikis; Where does learning happen?
12
Emobodied cognition
How do we learn, know, interpret and produce these new media?
13
Multiliteracies
What do we propose for the future of media literacies?
14
Learning week
Games and game design; Video editing
