#6.

 -New London Group. "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures." Harvard Educational Review. 66.1(1996): 1-32.

 -Shipka, Jody. Toward a Composition Made Whole. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh UP, 2011. (read through pg 82)

I see a wild amount of connections between The New London Group’s “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures”, Jody Shipka’s Toward A Composition Made Whole and the timeline I recently constructed. Actually, a concern that Shipka mentions in Chapter One of her book seems describe my timeline better than I previously had done. Shipka quotes Carolyn Handa, writing, “Not all that long go our writing classrooms looked like any others in the university. They contained desks arranged in rows, a podium facing the class, and blackboards covering one or two walls. Technology may have existed only has an overhead projector displaying transparencies with additional class material. Occasionally, instructors would show films related to course topics…Visuals were incidental props, tricks to spark students’ interests, more than viable communicative modes in themselves…By contrast, today’s wired classrooms provide students easy access to “a flood of visual images, icons, streaming video, and various hybrid forms of images and text” (18). My timeline tracked the evolution of these remediated technologies. Shipka connections this idea of a technology dependent visual society with issues of accessibility, especially in learning computer programs. I address this issue with my timeline too, as I look at the development of coding. My timeline uses the (fake) hashtag “literaciesoftechnology”, because I did not want to generalize in terms of just one technology; Shipka’s view aligns with mine, as she writes, “what I am cautioning against here is, first, an overly narrow definition of technology. It is not entirely clear of Handa counts the blackboards, podium, or desks arranged in rows as technologies. It appears not. But the description clearly overlooks many of the technologies typically present in the classroom: books, light switches, lightbulbs, floor and ceiling tiles, clocks, watches, water bottles, aluminum pop-top cans, eyeglasses, clothing, chalk, pens, paper, handwriting, and so on” (20). Shipka asserts that these technologies are also communicative modes, making my (fake) hashtag apt. I also include another (fake) hashtag, #computerdevelopment, to discuss the remediation of computer based technology, which Shipka recommends we differentiate from other technologies.  

I feel that my timeline connects with The New London Group’s article by way of accessibility. The New London Group’s interest in multiliteracies, which “overcome the limitations of traditional approaches by emphasizing how negotiating the multiple linguistic and cultural differences in our society is central to the pragmatics of the working, civic, and private lives of students” aligns with #Ohmann, #Selfe1999, and their analysis of Design makes me think of #Fitzpatrick’s making versus creating. The idea of lifeworlds and our ability to help shape them takes us back to the debate between Selfe and Slatin (and, in my interpretation, Bolter and Grusin) regarding our responsibilities as teachers and where the boundaries of our classrooms lie.