incite

     multiliteracies

 

Literacy can be defined as one's ability to fuction in the world; thus, in our modern age, it is so much more than the simply the ability to read and write. A person must be literate in written, oral, visual, audio, tactile, gestural, metacognitive, and spatial representations (New London Group, 1996). In order to develop life-long learners with capability in these areas, we need to apply learning theory to instruction. Since transmission-oriented instruction is ineffective for most students, it should be used minimally, in small chunks of time with the purpose of scaffolding instruction. As well, learners need to have hands-on learning opportunities where they practice all the modalities, for example, giving a live or recorded speech, creating products with visually represented ideas, or planning a design for social space. There is a tendency to overuse the written mode. Our society now uses a more balanced presentation of ideas using multiple modes of representation, so we should engage learners in representing multi-modally as well. Written literacy is firmly established as a foundation for detail-oriented communication, and it will continue to be highly important to us as a mode of communication; however, the changing nature of text in computer-mediated spaces has evolved text such that it can have visual, tactile, and spatial meanging due to its now 'hyper' capability.