Launch of the Salty Chip
The Salty Chip: A Canadian Multiliteracies’ Collaborative (http://saltychip.com/) launches for beta testing in early February, 2010. Please feel free to check in as we test the functionality and begin to upload the first ‘chips’. You are welcome to create your profile and contribute to the collaborative during this time, as the system is robust enough to collect chips while we are testing the system.
According to the Partnership for 21st Century Schools, “today’s education system faces irrelevance unless we bridge the gap between how students live and how they learn” (2004, p. 5). Over the past couple of decades, researchers have been investigating the disconnect between what are often called ‘out-of-school’ literacies, (see for instance Schultz & Hull, 2008) at the same time as we have seen an explosion of interest and investigation into multiliteracies’ practices with attention recently focused on how new literacies may be embedded in curricular practices in interconnected ways (Hagood, 2009).
Multiliteracies teaching and research engages numerous Web.20 tools that are changing the ways in which teachers and students interact with learning and demand new strategies for teaching, learning and research. In Tapscott & Williams’ (2006) revolutionary book, Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changes everything the authors argue that users of the web are increasingly creating “prosumer communities” and that “lead users” – people who stretch the limits of existing technology and often create their own product prototypes in the process – often develop modifications and extensions to products that will eventually appeal to mainstream markets. In other words, lead users serve as a beacon for where the mainstream market is headed. (p. 128)
In the context of multiliteracies and web 2.0, our adolescents are increasingly our lead users. Challenges faced by educators include how to harness what are often seen by adults as disruptive technologies, in powerful ways that reposition students and teachers from consumers to creators of information. Carroll, De Luise & Howard (2009) have suggested that perhaps it is time for us to reconsider our thinking about expertise:
We are not used to acknowledging adolescents as experts. We tend to interpret their ease with text messaging and downloading songs and television show on their iPods as insouciance instead of a kind of intelligence. We step away from their communications technology and reject the messages and the means as fads. Secretly, isn’t our resistance due, in part, to the fact that we don’t yet know how to incorporate the tools and the products of adolescents’ out-of-school worlds into our comfort zones-the in-school worlds in which we still hold power and set standards? (2009, p. 96)
The Salty Chip: A Canadian Multiliteracies’ Collaborative is one way to reconsider pedagogy in a participatory culture. This ‘Multiliteracies’ Collaborative has been developed in response to working with teachers and students as co-researchers over a number of years, at a time when our understanding of literacy has broadened to include ‘texts’ that go beyond the dominant print literacy to viewing literacies as plural, complex social and cultural practices. In this multiliteracies collaborative, we are interested in collectively sharing and better understanding how teachers and students create meaning in the context of using multiliteracies’ activities in pursuit of learning. In many ways it is a learning ecosystem; its growth is dependent upon the community that engage with its pages. I look forward to what we can build together.
I love chips!