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Lankshear & Knobel (2007) posit that the New Literacies are 'new' because of the mindset of users. Web 2.0 tools redefine these New Literacies to have four elements: socially recognized ways, meaningful content, encoded texts and Discources. These definitions "mobilize very different kinds of values and priorities and sensibilities." Mindsets about our contemporary world change information from being a commodity to being a relationship.
This made me think of my husband's career at People's United Bank. He's worked there for 17 years and a majority of that time has been spent in the web development/online services division. I asked him to tell me his thoughts on how he has seen customers' mindsets change over the last 17 years and how People's has had to modify the online content they produce. His anecdotal data (which I'm sure analysts at the bank have spreadsheets upon spreadsheets of hard data to back this up) supports the ideas put forth in this week's readings.
When he began working for the online division in 1997, the bank's services and information dissemination took place in the branches and purely on the internet, accessed by desktop computers. Publishers sent the content out to customers and customers consumed this information in a 'one-to-many' relationship. As social media, mobility and device availability became more prevalent, expectations of both the 'producer' and 'consumer' changed over time. Now, the consumers are publishers; a two-way conversation exists between the consumers themselves. Consumers expect ease and immediacy; the velocity of information transfer in an unfiltered, decentralized way permanently changed the way People's communicates with its customers. Myriad devices challenge what is now called the "Digital Channels" division to create responsive design, where the site adjusts to whichever device you happen to be using. Social media pushes out information that is more 'soft content' - community programming, local fundraisers, investment in the local people.
The democratization and virality of what some call Web 2.0 cannot be minimized, and we as educators must apply these changing mindsets and expectations to o ur students. Whether or not we subscribe to the idea of our students as 'digital natives,' we must allow for the multidimensional way consumers and producers lines are blurred and intersect. Just as the rules and the norm s - the 'Ethos Stuff' (Lankshear & Knobel, 2007) of New Literacies - are participatory, collaborative and distributed, so must our teaching be.
Resources:
Lankshear, C. & Knobel, M. (2007). Researching New Literacies: Web 2.0 Practices and Insider Perspectives. E-Learning, 4(3), 224-240.
Coiro, J., Knobel, M., Lankshear, C., & Leu, D.J. (Eds). (2008). Handbook of research on new literacies.
Image Credit:
Rorie, Mike. "The 5 Key Mindsets of Effective Managers." Go ITalk. N.p., 23 Aug. 2012. Web. 6 Sept. 2014.