Why Bother Theorizing Adolescent's Online Literacies for Classroom Practice and Research?

Why Bother? by Donna E. Alvermann in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. Sept. 2008

see PBS Documentary - "Growing Up Online" aired Jan 22, 2008.


"the increased availablity of hypermediated digital texts is having profound effects on how young people process information" (see Dresang, 2005

a move from "collection" to "connection" (Luke, p 400, 2003)
"Akin to Freire's banking concept of education, collection code curriculum implies that teachers depost knowledge 'bits' into students who, in turn, accumulate, indeed collect, largely disconnected discipline-baed facts and figures through skill-and-drill pedagogy. By contrast [in connection code courriculum], digitalized knowledge and networked environments, critical understandings of teh relations among ideas, their sources and histories, intertextual referents and consequences, are as important if not more so than mastery, reproduction, and recomination of discrete facts or units of information"

Bean and his daughters offered this observation: conventional text-bound teaching in the content areas belies how contemporary youths locate and use information that has relevance for them. (Bean, Bean, & Bean, 1999)

The work of literacy instruction is as much about listening and learning as it is about telling and teaching. Kirkland (22).

Bean. 1999. Intergenerational conversations and two adolescents' multiple literacies: implications for redefining content area literacy. JAAL, 42(6), 438-448.

Kirkland, (in press)

Luke, C. (2003) Pedagogy, connectivity, multimodality, and interdisciplinarity. RRQ, 38(3), 397-403.