Blog Post 1

     `    The most important takeaway from the readings was the concept of multimodality in the internet era, where it led to a breakdown of the traditional "programmer" and "user" or "consumer" positions in media (Gillen & Barton 2010 p. 5).  New digital literacy evolves and expands to larger populations, the concepts of media, scholarship, and collaborative working alter in conjunction. This knowledge must be merged into my reading method, or else I possibly miss out on valuable educational possibilities in the implementation or critical literary practices that I use. 

    "The distinctive contribution of the approach to literacy as social practice lies in the ways in which it involves careful and sensitive attention to what people do with texts, how they make sense of them and use them to further their own purposes in their own learning lives" (Gillen and Barton, 2010, p. 9). That quote makes me think about how social literacy is extremely important in a person's success. The ability to communicate and express one's thoughts and feelings as well as listen to others' thoughts and ideas is critical for learning. Identifying social cues and norms is immensely beneficial. The sociocultural aspect of literacy cannot be overstated. How we react to texts and how we use them to further our learning is a social construct just as much as our class or gender norms, and it influences our behavior and thought patterns just as much. Perceiving texts and incorporating them into my own learning process, in my experience, mainly aims to connect me to an intended outcome of "being educated," which would be embedded with the concepts of success and change.

Julia Gillen & David Barton, Digital Literacies: A Research Briefing by the Technology Enhanced                 Learning  Phase of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme: ESRC 2010.