New Technologies in Higher Education – ICT Skills or Digital Literacy?

AbstractThis study develops the argument that academic discourse may be seen as a feature of the discourse community within which it takes place. ‘Multiliteracies’, ‘Academic Literacies’, and ‘Digital Literacies’ with particular reference to EAP and Academic Discourse are considered. We argue for the inclusion of digital literacies within the EAP curriculum and specify the key components of the pedagogy of multiliteracies and attempt to locate them within the general field of EAP with relation to new technologies

‘I’m always on Facebook!’: exploring Facebook as a mainstream research tool and ethnographic site

This chapter discusses a research project which explored the everyday use of the social network site (SNS) Facebook by first-year undergraduate students in their transition to university. It not only explores the opportunities and challenges of using Facebook as a research site and how this digital approach may differ from a ‘mainstream’ ethnography, but also argues for this approach to be viewed as ‘mainstream’ due to the mediated nature of contemporary social life

Facebook Narratives

In this chapter I accept the argument that storytelling is a basic human impulse and suggest that Facebook provides a new medium through which individuals can articulate and share their stories and experiences. I describe how the ‘narrative turn’ in social studies research situates narratives as a process of cultural reproduction and drawing on this perspective, argue that the affordances of Facebook shape stories in ways that reinforce particular cultural meanings

A Two-Dimensional Framework for Analyzing Facebook Use and Subjective Well-Being

The present research aimed to organize the array of Facebook activities by proposing a framework that comprises two dimensions: mode of Facebook communication and motive of Facebook use.  Our research also aimed to address the less explored issue of users’ appraisals in addition to their Facebook use.  A new measure, the Facebook Use and Satisfaction Scale, was constructed. Among 155 undergraduates (43% men, mean age = 21.02 years), the results indicated that satisfaction with both private and public social communication was positively linked with positive affect but not negative affect.  More importantly, satisfaction with private social communication explained 9% of the variance in positive affect beyond that explained by perceived peer support.  These results point to the utility of the proposed two-dimensional framework in the study of Facebook satisfaction

mStories: exploring semiotics and praxis of user-generated mobile stories

© 2014 Taylor & Francis. Innovations in information and communication technologies have allowed people to actively author multimodal content and engage in new meaning-making practices. New Literacies research has gone some way to understanding new meaning-making behaviours. However, this research often derives its understandings from studies undertaken with students enrolled in formal educational settings. Mobile technologies are increasingly situated outside such domains; the informal use of these devices by adults remains on the periphery of scholarly focus. mStories is a creative participatory digital mobile storytelling project. Taking a multidimensional perspective, this article presents the in-depth case analysis of one participant and their mStory. A semiotic analysis found that the user-generated content demonstrated complex and sophisticated multimodal sense relations. However, control over the textual or compositional meta-function of the text was determined largely by the computer interface, with users habituated to relinquishing authorial control over this element. Within this study, mobile literacy praxis was characteristically ad hoc and contextually embedded, and though mobile technology invites such practices, users were neither determined nor limited by this, and happily turned to other devices where necessary

La norma disortográfica en la escritura digital

En este trabajo se analizan los nuevos procesos de escritura en las redes sociales. Se propone el término escritura disortográfica para designar una nueva norma de escritura que discrepa intencionadamente de la norma culta del español en determinados géneros textuales exclusivos de la escritura digital. La norma disortográfica en español no supone una alternativa a la norma culta basada en la tradición cultural y en el canon literario; por el contrario, se trata de un nuevo proceso de escritura digital que utiliza una ortografía fonética, junto a otros rasgos orales y multimodales, como un elemento esencial en la imagen que los jóvenes quieren transmitir a otros usuarios en los procesos de comunicación a través de las redes sociales

Winking at Facebook: capturing digitally-mediated classroom learning

In this article I present an innovative combination of methods, used in a study of the use of Facebook as an educational resource by five dyslexic students at a Sixth Form College in north-west England. Through a project in which teacher-researcher and student-participants co-constructed a Facebook group page about the students’ scaffolded research into dyslexia, the study examined the educational affordances of a digitally-mediated social network. Combining multiple data-collection methods including participant-observation, semi-structured interviews, video recordings, dynamic screen capture (Cox, 2007), protocol analysis (Ericsson & Simon, 1993) helped to capture in detail multiple perspectives on the learning that happened in the classroom over the five weeks of the research project's lifetime. Aggregating the resulting data in turn enabled meticulous, comprehensive analysis and rigorous theorising. The article presents and analyses excerpts from the data which help to illustrate the insights gained into one participant's learning trajectory. I argue that the combination of methods employed could be used with any range of research participants in other studies exploring learning through Facebook and other Web 2.0 spaces. The article concludes by suggesting further refinements to the methods used

New approaches to literacy problems: Multiliteracies and inclusive pedagogies

This study investigates the Alternative Certification Program (ACP) students’ motivations to become teachers. Fit-Choice Scale is used. Sample of the study consists of 248 participants in three groups i.e. Health, Sports and Mathematics. Descriptive and inferential statistics, and content analysis are used to examine ACP students’ reasons to want to become teachers, and to investigate differences regarding their primary career choices, age and gender. The results showed that social, intrinsic career and personal utility values are the highly rated motivation factors. Teaching is perceived as a highly skillful occupation and a high status profession by the ACP students. Relationships between ACP students’ motivations and perceptions with their primary career choices, age and gender are identified. Health group had higher motivation for time for family, and Sports group had higher motivation for ability and job security. Mathematics group’s motivation for job transferability, perception scores of salary and social status of teaching profession and career choice satisfaction were lower than the other groups. Yet their perception scores of difficulty was higher than the others. ACP students older than the mean age of 26 had higher scores of self-perceptions of ability, intrinsic career value, job transferability and work with children factors than their young classmates. Significant differences are observed between male and female participants’ motivation of having time for family. Together with contrasting findings and particular similarities with the previous research, these relationships are used to conclude that ACP students themselves have different motivation patterns. Influence of sample characteristics and contextual features are also acknowledged