New Media Literacies

From Pleistocene-epoch cave drawings to texts produced via movable type, to on-demand video content accessed via personal mobile devices, the means of message production and distribution has expanded from exclusive and local to inclusive and international. During the same period, media have evolved from one-way mono-modal communication to interactive, multimodal, social experiences. New media platforms provide educators with the means to connect academic literacy with learner literacies. A growing body of new media literacies research highlights some of the ways educators have integrated new media literacies into learning spaces without colonizing learner practices to align solely with conventional literacy goals and neoliberalism. For these educators, the challenge comes in designing ways for learners to meaningfully use their new media literacies within educational systems that continue to privilege psycholinguistic skills and particular print media practices as the source of academic capital