New Literacies Sampler -.:: GEOCITIES.Ws

Colin Lankshear, Michele Knobel, Chris Bigum, and Michael Peters General Editors Vol. 29 PETER LANG New York y Washington, D.C./Baltimore y Bern Frankfurt am Main y Berlin y Brussels y Vienna y Oxford Edited by Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear PETER LANG New York y Washington, D.C./Baltimore y Bern Frankfurt am Main y Berlin y Brussels y Vienna y Oxford Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Knobel, Michele. A new literacies sampler / edited by Michele Knobel, Colin Lankshear. p. cm. — (New literacies and digital epistemologies; vol. 29) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Media literacy. 2. Mass media in education. I. Title. P96.M4 N59 302.23—dc22 2006037193 ISBN 978-0-8204-9523-1 ISSN 1523-9543 Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek. Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.ddb.de/. Cover design by Joni Holst The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council of Library Resources. © 2007 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York 29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006 www.peterlang.com All rights reserved. Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited. Printed in the United States of America Knobel_FM.qxd 30/11/2006 21:40 Page v To young (and not so young) digital insiders who inspire people like us Knobel_FM.qxd 30/11/2006 21:40 Page vi Knobel_FM.qxd 30/11/2006 21:40 Page vii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ix Chapter 1: Sampling “the New” in New Literacies 1 Colin Lankshear & Michele Knobel Chapter 2: “You Won’t Be Needing Your Laptops Today”: Wired Bodies in the Wireless Classroom 25 Kevin M. Leander Chapter 3: Popular Websites in Adolescents’ Out-of-School Lives: Critical Lessons on Literacy 49 Jennifer C. Stone Chapter 4: Agency and Authority in Role-Playing “Texts” 67 Jessica Hammer Chapter 5: Pleasure, Learning, Video Games, and Life: The Projective Stance 95 James Paul Gee Chapter 6: Digital Design: English Language Learners and Reader Reviews in Online Fiction 115 Rebecca W. Black Chapter 7: Blurring and Breaking through the Boundaries of Narrative, Literacy, and Identity in Adolescent Fan Fiction 137 Angela Thomas Chapter 8: Looking from the Inside Out: Academic Blogging as New Literacy 167 Julia Davies & Guy Merchant Knobel_FM.qxd 30/11/2006 21:40 Page viii VIII | A NEW LITERACIES SAMPLER Chapter 9: Online Memes, Affinities, and Cultural Production 199 Michele Knobel & Colin Lankshear Chapter 10: New Literacies 229 Cynthia Lewis Contributors 239 Subject Index 243 Author Index 249 Knobel_FM.qxd 30/11/2006 21:40 Page ix Acknowledgements The authors wish to thank the following for generously granting permission for their original work to be used in this book: the faculty and students at “Ridgeview Academy” (Chapter 2); Liz, Mike, Fran, Bill, Robert, Charles, Anne, Karl and Cassie for their insights into live action role-play games (Chapter 4); Nanako Tanako and her fanfic reviewers (Chapter 6); Tiana and Jandalf for their interview data, images and fanfic writing (Chapter 7); Jandalf for her sketch of Jemaei (Figure 7.3); and Mohawk/Limbert for permission to use the doll tea image appearing in Chapter 8 (Figure 8.3). We would also like to thank the following for their permission to use their images on the cover of this book: Julia Davies and Guy Merchant for the screen shot from Blogtrax (blogtrax.blogsome.com); Zack Johnson for the image of Arwennie from the massively multiplayer online role playing game, Kingdom of Loathing (kingdomofloathing.com, © Asymmetric Publications, LLC); Jandalf for her sketch of Jemaei; Jay Maynard for the image of his Tron cosplay (Tronguy.com); and Rob Lewis for a webpage screenshot from Stickdeath (stickdeath.com). The Editors thank the authors of the chapters for being part of this project. We thank them for being friends and colleagues who sustain, Knobel_FM.qxd 30/11/2006 21:40 Page x X | A NEW LITERACIES SAMPLER inspire, and encourage us and so many others in our collective endeavor to better understand “new literacies”. We hope each and every one of them walks long and happily in this world—and all the other worlds they variously inhabit. We also thank everyone at Peter Lang Publishing for being so easy to work with on this project, and on the New Literacies series as a whole. In particular, we’d like to thank Sophie Appel and Chris Myers for their input, help and good humor. knobel_01.qxd 30/11/2006 21:40 Page 1 C H A P T E R O N E Sampling “the New” in New Literacies COLIN LANKSHEAR AND MICHELE KNOBEL Sampling This book “samples” work in the broad area of new literacies research on two levels. First, it samples some typical examples of new literacies. These are video gam- ing, fan fiction writing, weblogging, using websites to participate in affinity practices, and social practices involving mobile computing. The question of what it is about these practices that makes us think of them as “new” and as “literacies” will occupy much of this introductory chapter. Second, it samples from among the wide range of approaches potentially available for researching and studying new literacies. The studies assembled in this col- lection are all examples of what is referred to as research undertaken from a sociocultural perspective on literacy. New literacies can be studied from a range of research and theoretical orientations (cf. Leu et al. forthcoming). For reasons that will become apparent from our account of “new literacies,” however, a sociocultural perspective is especially appropriate and valuable for researching new literacies. A Sociocultural Approach to Literacies Understanding literacies from a sociocultural perspective means that reading and writing can only be understood in the contexts of social, cultural, political, economic, historical practices to which they are integral, of which they are a part. This view lies at the heart of what Gee (1996) calls the “new” literacy studies, or socioliteracy knobel_01.qxd 30/11/2006 21:40 Page 2 2 | A NEW LITERACIES SAMPLER studies (see also Hull and Schultz 2001, Knobel 1999, Lankshear 1997, Street 1984, 1995). The relationship between human practice and the production, distri- bution, exchange, refinement, negotiation and contestation of meanings is a key idea here. Human practices are meaningful ways of doing things or getting things done (Scribner and Cole 1981; also Franklin 1990, Hull and Schultz 2001). There is no practice without meaning, just as there is no meaning outside of practice. Within contexts of human practice, language (words, literacy, texts) gives meaning to contexts and, dialectically, contexts give meaning to language. Hence, there is no reading or writing in any meaningful sense of each term outside social practices. If we see literacy as “simply reading and writing”—whether in the sense of encoding and decoding print, as a tool, a set of skills, or a technology, or as some kind of psychological process—we cannot make sense of our literacy experience. Reading (or writing) is always reading something in particular with understanding. Different kinds of text require “somewhat different backgrounds and somewhat different skills” if they are to be read (i.e., read meaningfully). Moreover, particular texts can be read in different ways, contingent upon different people’s experiences of practices in which these texts occur. A Christian Fundamentalist, for example, will read texts from the Bible in radically different ways from, say, a liberation theology priest. They will make different meanings from specific texts, interact with these texts differently, put them to different “uses” (e.g., to justify or affirm different courses of action to be taken in the world), and so on. Learning to read and write particular kinds of texts in particular ways presup- poses immersion in social practices where participants “not only read texts of this type in this way but also talk about such texts in certain ways, hold certain attitudes and values about them, and socially interact over them in certain ways” (Gee, Hull and Lankshear 1996, 3). Different histories of “literate immersion” yield different forms of reading and writing as practice.The texts we read and write—any and all texts we read and write; even the most arid (and otherwise meaningless) drill and skill, reme- dial session “readings”—are integral elements of “lived, talked, enacted, value-and- belief-laden practices” engaged in under specific conditions, at specific times and in specific places (ibid.). Consequently, it is impossible to abstract or decontextualize “literacy bits” from their larger embedded practices and for them still to mean what they do in fact mean experientially. Furthermore, and obviously, there is no one sin- gular phenomenon that is literacy. Rather, there are as many literacies as there are “social practices and conceptions of reading and writing” (Street 1984, 1). Sociocultural Definitions of “Literacies” Sociocultural definitions of literacy, then, have to make sense of reading, writing and meaning-making as integral elements of social practices. One such definition is knobel_01.qxd 30/11/2006 21:40 Page 3 SAMPLING “THE NEW” IN NEW LITERACIES | 3 provided by Gee (1996), who defines literacy in relation to Discourses. Discourses are socially recognized ways of using language (reading, writing, speaking, listening), gestures and other semiotics (images, sounds, graphics, signs, codes), as well as ways of thinking, believing, feeling, valuing, acting/doing and interacting in relation to people and things, such that we can be identified and recognized as being a member of a socially meaningful group, or as playing a socially meaningful role (cf., Gee 1991, 1996, 1998).

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