a new literacies dictionary: primer for the twenty-first century learner

   adam mackie   Master of Arts in English,

   with a concentration in education,

   Colorado State University

    adam.mackie@colostate.edu

foreword:

   Dr. Pamela Coke, Associate Professor of English Education and the author of the "foreword" (click here to read her "foreword" to this work), served as Adam Mackie's adviser for graduate study in English Education at Colorado State University and for the consummation of A New Litercies Dictionary: Primer for the Twenty-first Century Learner. 

preface:

Primer for the Twenty-first Century Learner

A New Literacies Dictionary: Primer for the Twenty-first Century Learner has been designed in Google Sites. The web-based dictionary was defended as a Master of Arts project at Colorado State University in October 2010. The project passed with distinction. The twenty-first century dictionary and primer details the experience of an English Education graduate student at CSU. All of the entries generally connect to teaching and learning with new literacies, multimodal pedagogy, and digital literacy. The entries are aimed at an audience of both twenty-first century educators and twenty-first century learners. Entries range from blogs, collaborations with other students, unit and lesson plans, rubrics, news stories, BookNotes, poetry, and reflective essays. The entries may be read A-to-Z, Z-to A, or entries can be read erratically. The erratic nature of the project design bears witness to the age of reading recursively using methods such as hyperlinks, which shifts from traditional chronological, cover-to-cover, methods. The purpose of A New Literacies Dictionary aims to provide teachers and students in a digital age with ideas, materials, and a conversational piece that encompasses the ever-changing modes of twenty-first century composition.

acknowledgements:

   My wife, Margaret, and my son, Noah, slept by me through countless sleepless nights and stood by me through countless days away to bring A New Literacies Dictionary: Primer for the Twenty-first Century Learner into being. For their love, for their patience, and for the Spirit of the Creator present within our family, I am forever grateful. 

   I am also deeply grateful for Dr. Pamela K. Coke’s endless support and guidance. As my Master of Arts in English Education adviser at Colorado State University, she supported my thinking and believed in me from the beginning. She literally said, “I believe in you.” I believe wholeheartedly that speaking those four words to another person has the power to transform this world. They transformed mine.

   For poetic and aesthetic inspiration, I thank my departmental committee member and poetry teacher Dan Beachy-Quick. He has enacted a profound change in my work as a reader, thinker, and poet over the last two years. Dan always has a way of helping me see light through a multitude of rough cuts on a diamond’s surface. 

   I appreciate Dr. Rodrick Lucero’s willingness in the School of Education to act as a committee member from outside the Department of English and for helping me see the reality of “dual purpose pedagogy” that the dictionary serves. Lucero continues to be an outstanding model of what it means to be a teacher in the place we call school. I will be an amazing teacher if I can be half the teacher he is – thank you Rod for seeing the best in me. 

   I owe a thank you to all the instructors and faculty in the Department of English at CSU; thank you to those who have walked with me as a Graduate Teaching Assistant of Rhetoric and Composition to senior faculty across the board. I am going to take advantage of the technology to hyperlink to the Department’s faculty page here because so many of you have helped my learning in ways you may or may not know – thank you all!

   Outside of the Department of English, many faculty members in the School of Education have also been extremely influential in my professional development of becoming a licensed teacher. Dr. James Folkestad believed in me enough to nominate me as the first HASTAC Scholar from CSU in 2010 and invited me to join an interdisciplinary Digital Media and Learning workgroup on campus. This has continued to expand my passion for learning in countless ways. Jim and I continue to work with Monika Hardy and the InnovationsLab at Thompson Valley High School in Loveland. I have to thank Monika for helping me to better understand the word “passion,” for helping me notice, dream, connect, and do, and for continually reminding me (whether she is aware of it or not) to keep my pedagogy real.

   Others I would like to thank are, of course, my mother for always believing in me and reminding me of all the rules of standardized English that I have a tendency to forget. I would like to thank all those I’ve collaborated with during my time at CSU (especially the ones whose writing contribute to this dictionary), fellow graduate students and pre-service teachers, and everyone willing to take the time to read my project.

   Finally, a tremendous thank you goes to Dr. Sarah Sloane for leading me to the direction of Dr. Michael Palmquist in the Institute for Learning and Teaching at CSU. Mike welcomed the idea of repurposing the Web-based dictionary into a format that was able to exist in both digital and print-based formats. Thank you, Mike, for having a big enough vision for the both of us to make a dream of mine a reality. 

   There are many who are not named that deserve a direct thank you. If you are reading this now, and are one of these people, please accept my heart’s gratitude.

introduction:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that                     I had not lived.”

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Chapter 2, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived for”

I went to new literacies because I wished to teach deliberately, to front only the essential facts of pedagogy, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to retire, discover that I had not taught.

Adapted by Adam Mackie

    Welcome to A New Literacies Dictionary Primer for the Twenty-first Century Learner. This dictionary, available in print and digital formats, intends to serve twenty-first century teachers and twenty-first century learners. The hyperlinked entries are a resource, a reference, and a tool for those interested in teaching lessons in new literacies or for those seeking ideas, samples, discussions, and reflections on digital and multimodal texts. A discussion on a contemporary definition of new literacy can be found within the entry on "Literacy," but can be understood as a "sociocultural perspective on literacy" (Lankshear and Knobel 1) or a literacy accounting for the relational aspects of information exchange. An underlying goal of A New Literacies Dictionary is to connect teachers and students in the twenty-first century with a resource that offers multi-literate inspiration in an age of ever-changing literacy.

   In the summer of 2009,I was reading Walden by Henry David Thoreau at my in-laws' house on Hatch Lake in Upstate New York. I remember becoming inspired about Thoreau’s discussion on deliberation and his famous words about going to the woods to live deliberately. As an English Education graduate student and pre-service teacher, I wondered how I would bring deliberation into my pedagogy and go into the classroom to teach deliberately. I had no idea that asking a single question to myself about deliberation  (What will it mean for me to teach deliberately?) would lead me down a road of new literacies, teaching with digital technology and multimodal pedagogy, and digitally composing a digital dictionary of instructional materials in a variety of genres.

   I enrolled in a graduate-level, professional concerns English course, covering teaching and learning in a digital age taught by Associate Professor of English Dr. Cindy O’Donnell-Allen, the following fall. I was resistant to implementing digital technology going into the course and related to a poet likening computer and Internet technology to juggling chainsaws. I was taught as a younger student to turn to antiquity and the classics as a guide to my education, reading works by Plato, Aristotle, and Lao Tzu. 

   However, throughout the course on teaching and learning in a digital age, something happened. Call it a twenty-first century awakening. Call it an upgrade to my thinking application. Whatever you call it, there was a personality change that occurred. I realized, throughout O’Donnell-Allen’s course, that I needed to understand new literacies better and effectively combine my classical education with the tools of the twenty-first century. Juxtaposition became a watchword. New literacies and teaching with digital technology would become a way for me to practice deliberation in my pedagogy.

   The idea of writing A New Literacies Dictionary: Primer for the Twenty-first Century Learner came about slowly. First, I was inspired by poetic projects I saw where dictionaries were created from grouping many essays, meditations, and reflections together. Assistant Professor of English Dan Beachy-Quick’s A Whaler’s Dictionary was the work, in particular, that served as a catalyst for inspiration. I encountered Beachy-Quick’s dictionary while completing a course through Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick.

   When I presented the idea to my academic adviser, Dr. Pamela K. Coke, I had not narrowed and arrived at the concrete proposal of writing a dictionary around new literacies. I just knew I wished to deliberately write a dictionary. However, the more I got engrossed in the reading and research of new literacies I realized that this was an avenue I desired to explore.

   After speaking with Beachy-Quick about an idea of writing an educational dictionary, he suggested I take a look at nineteenth century primers. I sought content and aesthetic inspiration in The New-England Primer, 1777 edition, as well as the revised version written by Noah Webster and the Westminster Assembly in 1789. As I considered the importance and relevance of these primers to eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century students, I realized the need for a twenty-first century primer.

   It only made sense for me to choose a form that informed the content of the work I was setting out to do. Though A New Literacies Dictionary lends itself to a print-based, glue-bound form, an online web-based dictionary gives itself to a teacher/student audience, anywhere, given an Internet connection. Poetically speaking, Charles Olson's and Robert Creeley’s famous words also influenced my decision to take a digital form for a project involving digital matter. Creeley once said in an interview, when addressing a concern of tone in poetry that “there’s an appropriate way of saying something inherent in the thing to be said” (Packard 197). I, therefore, set myself to the task of importing content onto a Ning, a popular social networking site, which was free at the time.

    Ning, however, changed their policies halfway through the construction of the dictionary and became a fee-based service. I was not interested in paying Ning to host the dictionary, so I migrated to Google Sites. The dictionary you now see has gone through several aesthetic changes since its birth on Google Sites and the content can be revised, edited or upgraded if ever the need may arise. It's my highest hope that readers will read the entries as deliberately as they were constructed. Readers are invited to explore, navigate, and use this dictionary for teaching and learning all forms of literacy in the twenty-first century.

Adam Mackie

Colorado State University

a new literacies dictionary: 

primer for the twenty-first century learner