New literacies generally refers to new forms of literacy made possible by digital technology developments, although new literacies do not necessarily have to involve use of digital technologies to be recognized as such. The term "new literacies" itself is relatively new within the field of literacy studies (the first documented mention of it in an academic article title dates to 1993 in a text by David Buckingham).[1] Its definition remains open, with new literacies being conceptualized in different ways by different groups of scholars.
A central challenge appears in new literacies research given that literacy is now deictic, continually and rapidly changing as new technologies appear and new social practices for literacy emerge. (Leu, 2000). How can adequate theory be developed when the object that is studied is itself ephemeral, continuously being redefined by a changing context? This is an important theoretical challenge that has not previously faced. Some (Leu, O'Byrne, Zawilinski, McVerry, & Everett-Cacopardo, 2009) propose a dual-level theory of new literacies. To account for the continuous changes taking place to literacy as well as the growing multiplicity of perspectives that are emerging, they frame new literacies theory on two levels: lower case (new literacies) and upper case (New Literacies). Lower case theories explore a specific area of new literacies and/or a new technology, such as the social communicative transactions occurring with text messaging (e.g., Lewis & Fabos, 2005). Lower case theories also include those who explore a focused disciplinary base, such as the semiotics of multimodality in online media (e.g., Kress, 2003) or a distinctive conceptual approach such as new literacy studies (Street, 1995, 2003). These lower case theories are better able to keep up with the rapidly changing nature of literacy in a deictic world since they are closer to the specific types of changes that are taking place and interest those who study them within a particular heuristic. Lower case theories also permit the field to maximize the lenses that are used and the technologies and contexts that are studied. Every scholar who studies new literacy issues is generating important insights for everyone else, even if they do not share a particular lens, technology, or context. How, though, does the field come to understand these insights, taking place in many different fields from many different perspectives? For this, a second level of theory, an upper case New Literacies theory, appears to be necessary.
What defines this broader theory of New Literacies? New Literacies, as the broader, more inclusive concept, includes those common findings emerging across multiple, lower case theories. New Literacies theory benefits from work taking place in the multiple, lower case dimensions of new literacies by looking for what appear to be the most common and consistent patterns being found in lower case theories and lines of research. This approach permits everyone to fully explore their unique, lowercase perspective of new literacies, allowing scholars to maintain close focus on many different aspects of the rapidly shifting landscape of literacy during a period of rapid change. At the same time, each also benefits from expanding their understanding of other, lowercase, new literacies perspectives. By assuming change in the model, everyone is open to a continuously changing definition of literacy, based on the most recent data that emerges consistently, across multiple perspectives, disciplines, and research traditions. Moreover, areas in which alternative findings emerge are identified, enabling each to be studied again, from multiple perspectives. From this process, common patterns emerge and are included in a broader, common, New Literacies theory.
This process enables the broader theory of New Literacies to keep up with consistent elements that will always define literacy on the Internet while it also informs each of the lower case theories of new literacies with patterns that are being regularly found by others. This approach assumes that when literacy is deictic and multifaceted, a dual-level theory of New Literacies is not only essential; it also provides a theoretical advantage over any single-dimensional approach to theory building and research. Scholars are richer for working together and engaging in common research and theoretical conversations, something that happens too rarely in literacy research.
Accompanying the varying conceptualizations of new literacies, there are a range of terms used by different researchers when referring to new literacies, including 21st century literacies, internet literacies, digital literacies, new media literacies, multiliteracies, information literacy, ICT literacies, and computer literacy. In the Handbook of New Literacies Research, Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear, and Leu (2008) note that all these terms “are used to refer to phenomena we would see as falling broadly under a new literacies umbrella” (pg. 10).[2]
Commonly recognized examples of new literacies include such practices as instant messaging, blogging, maintaining a website, participating in online social networking spaces, creating and sharing music videos, podcasting and videocasting, photoshopping images and photo sharing, emailing, shopping online, digital storytelling, participating in online discussion lists, emailing and using online chat, conducting and collating online searches, reading, writing and commenting on fan fiction, processing and evaluating online information, creating and sharing digital mashups, etc. (see: Black, 2008; Coiro, 2003; Gee, 2007; Jenkins, 2006; Kist, 2007; Lankshear & Knobel, 2006; Lessig, 2005; Leu, et al 2004; Prensky, 2006).
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The field of new literacies is characterized by two theoretically distinct approaches that overlap to some extent. One is informed by cognitive and language processing theories such as cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, schema theory, metacognition, constructivism, and other similar theories. This orientation includes a particular focus on examining the cognitive and social processes involved in comprehending online or digital texts (see for example: Leu, 2001; Leu, Kinzer, Coiro, & Cammack, 2004; Coiro, 2003; Coiro & Dobler, 2007). Donald Leu, a prominent researcher in the field of new literacies, has outlined four defining characteristics of new literacies, according to a largely psycholinguistic orientation (see: Leu et al, 2007). First, new technologies (such as the internet) and the novel literacy tasks that pertain to these new technologies require new skills and strategies to effectively use them. Second, new literacies are a critical component of full participation—civic, economic, and personal—in our increasingly global society. A third component to this approach is new literacies are deictic—that is, they change regularly as new technology emerges and older technologies fade away. With this in mind, “what may be important in reading instruction and literacy education is not to teach any single set of new literacies, but rather to teach students how to learn continuously new literacies that will appear during their lifetime.”[3] Finally, new literacies are “multiple, multimodal, and multifaceted,” and as such, multiple points of view will be most beneficial in attempting to comprehensively analyze them.[3]
The second approach to studying new literacies is overtly grounded in a focus on social practices. According to Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel from this "social practice" perspectives, "new literacies" can refer to “new socially recognized ways of generating, communicating and negotiating meaningful content through the medium of encoded texts within contexts of participation in Discourses (or, as members of Discourses) ”.[4] From this perspective “new” refers to the presence of two dominant features of contemporary literacy practices. The first is the use of digital technologies as the means of producing, sharing, accessing and interacting with meaningful content. New literacies typically involve screens and pixels rather than paper and type, and digital code (that renders texts as image, sound, conventional text, and any combination of these within a single process) rather than material print. The second defining feature of new literacies is their highly collaborative, distributed, and participatory nature, as expressions of what Henry Jenkins[5] calls engagement in participatory culture, and Lankshear and Knobel[6] refer to as a distinctive ethos.
Research within the field of new literacies is also diverse. A wide range of topics and issues are focused upon, and a broad range of methodologies are used.
One aspect of new literacies that has attracted researchers’ attention is school-age children's online reading comprehension. Specifically, researchers are interested in finding the answers to questions such as how reading online differs from traditional print-based reading. In their research, Donald Leu and Julie Coiro attempt to understand how students become adept at online reading, and how students acquire the necessary skills, strategies, and dispositions to comprehend online texts.[7] According to Leu and colleagues, the new literacies of online reading comprehension are based around five defining functions: “These new literacies allow us to use the Internet and other ICT to identify important questions, locate information, critically evaluate the usefulness of that information, synthesize information to answer those questions, and then communicate the answers to others”[8]
Recent research in the field of new literacies has focused on fan fiction on the internet, especially those stories published online by adolescents (see for example: Black, 2008; Thomas, 2007; Jenkins, 2006). Online fan fiction websites, such as FanFiction.Net, are spaces where fans of all ages, but especially adolescents and younger school-age fans, are able to use these new information and communication technologies (ICTs) to write and craft fictional stories based on their favorite characters in popular media such as movies, television, and graphic novels. Adolescents are participating more and more on these kinds of sites, not only engaging with “pop culture and media, but also with a broad array of literate activities that are aligned with many school-based literacy practices”[9]
Of course, adults are just as able to spend time in such online environments—and they do. However, it is interesting to consider that young people were born into a digitally rich world, and thus could be seen as “digital natives,” and therefore interact with the online environment in a fundamentally distinct way than an older generation of people, so-called “digital immigrants."[10] As digital natives, adolescents “use the online world to share, evaluate, create, report and program with each other differently to digital immigrants,” and they engage easily and readily with new digital technologies such as instant messaging, file sharing songs and videos, and post all kinds of ‘texts,’ stories, photos, and videos among them.[10] A central characteristic of digital natives is their “desire to create."[10] Digital natives are engaged in “programming to some extent, whether it be by including a piece of HTML code that personalizes a MySpace page or creating a Flash animation. They are creating web pages, blogs, avatars and worlds; and, in stark contrast to digital immigrants, digital natives readily report and share their ideas.”[10]
James Paul Gee described video gaming as a new literacy “in virtue of the ways game design involves a multimodal code comprising images, actions, words, sounds, and movements that players interpret according to gaming conventions”.[11] Gee notes that game players participate in their game’s world as a form of social practice, especially in real-time strategy games in which players can compete with each other to build on land masses, for instance, and in which they can shape and convey their virtual identities as a certain kind of strategist. Video games continue to use new digital technologies to create the symbols players interpret to encode and decode the meanings that constitute the game.[12]
Other researchers have expanded the body of knowledge about video games as a new literacy, particularly as they relate to classroom learning (see for example: Gerber, 2009; Lacasa, Martinez, & Mendez, 2008; Sanford & Madill, 2007). In one study[13], researchers examined how video games, supported by discussions and dramatic performances in the classroom, can contribute to the development of narrative thought as demonstrated in written compositions in various contexts. Namely, the researchers engaged primary school children in activities designed to teach them to tell, play out, and write stories based on the most popular video game in their classroom, Tomb Raider. Although it was a challenging process at times, researchers discovered that the use of new digital media such as video games actually “complements the use of other written or audiovisual methods [in the classroom] and permits the development of multiple literacies in the classroom.”[14]
It has become clear to many researchers in the field that we need to better understand new literacies so that we can answer one critical question: How can educators best incorporate new literacies into the classroom? Kist (2007) observes that in the literature, there are examples of how new literacies can be used in classroom settings—from the use of rap music to anime to digital storytelling, there are already instances of teachers attempting to blend new literacies with traditional literacy practices in the classroom.[15] Kist asks: “Can new literacies indeed ‘fit’ into how we currently ‘do’ school?” Kist notes that “the new literacies instruction that does exist often comes only out of the fortitude of lonely pioneers of new literacies.”[16]
Knobel and Lankshear (2006) argue that if educators and prospective teachers engage in blogging, or participate in “affinity spaces” devoted to practices like fan fiction, video game-playing, music and video remixing, photosharing, and the like, they will better understand how new literacies can better be integrated into worthwhile classroom learning.[17]
Leu, Coiro, Castek, Hartman, Henry, & Reinking (2008) have begun to explore the use of a modified instructional model of reciprocal teaching that reflects some of the differences between offline and online reading contexts. In an instructional model known as Internet Reciprocal Teaching, each student has his/her own laptop with access to the Internet and students work in small groups to facilitate interactive group work and discussions about strategy use. In addition, Internet Reciprocal Teaching with online informational resources (as opposed to narrative texts) and strategy instruction on both the common and unique processes by which students navigate through multiple and different texts, rather than the reading of one common text. Teachers and students model their choices about which links are most relevant to a group or individual question through think-alouds. They discuss how to efficiently locate information within different kinds of websites, how to synthesize ideas across multiple texts and media, how to make judgments about the quality of the information and the author's level of expertise, and how to best represent the answers to their questions. Responsibility for monitoring and effectively using these strategies to solve online information problems is gradually released to the students using an instructional scheme with three phases: Phase 1 includes direct, whole class instruction of basic skills and strategies of Internet use; Phase 2 includes group work and the reciprocal exchange of online reading comprehension strategies by students with their peers; and Phase 3 includes online individual inquiry units, sometimes with collaborative efforts involving other students in other classes, perhaps even in other parts of the world, and periodic strategy sessions with groups.[18]