New Literacies Sampler

The Editor: Michele Knobel is Professor of Education at Montclair State University in New Jersey, where she coordinates the graduate and undergraduate literacy programs. Colin Lankshear is Professor of Education at James Cook University, Australia, and Visiting Scholar at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Their current research agenda focuses on new literacies and other social practices involving digital technologies under emerging conditions of Web 2.0 and the philosophy and conduct of teacher research. Their recent books include A Handbook for Teacher Research (2004), and New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Classroom Learning (2nd edition, 2006).

• Contents: Colin Lankshear/Michele Knobel: Sampling «the New» in New Literacies – Kevin M. Leander: «You Won’t Be Needing Your Laptops Today»: Wired Bodies in the Wireless Classroom – Jennifer C. Stone: Popular Websites in Adolescents’ Out-of-School Lives: Critical Lessons on Literacy – Jessica Hammer: Agency and Authority in Role-Playing «Texts» – James Paul Gee: Pleasure, Learning, Video Games, and Life: The Projective Stance – Rebecca W. Black: Digital Design: English Language Learners and Reader Reviews in Online Fiction – Angela Thomas: Blurring and Breaking through the Boundaries of Narrative, Literacy, and Identity in Adolescent Fan Fiction – Julia Davies/Guy Merchant: Looking from the Inside Out: Academic Blogging as New Literacy – Michele Knobel/Colin Lankshear: Online Memes, Affinities, and Cultural Production – Cynthia Lewis: New Literacies.

«An insightful and highly provocative volume! At a time when schools are under increasing pressure to revamp for a globalized, networked, and informational age, there is an unfortunate paucity of deep reflection on what it takes to prepare our young people to be active participants, citizens, learners, and designers of a networked society. ‘A New Literacies Sampler’ fills this gap amply and is destined to be an important milestone in literacy studies and education.» (Wan Shun Eva Lam, Assistant Professor, Northwestern University)«Knobel and Lankshear have assembled the most illuminating blend of scholarly ‘samples’ I have seen for revealing the architecture of new literacies. These cogently written chapters build upon each other to clarify and critique new mediums and new practices for collective participation in distributed meaning-making enabled by user-driven technologies. This edited volume is the best guide to understanding the emergent techno/ethos that constitutes new literacies in the era of Web 2.0.» (Jabari Mahiri, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Education, University of California at Berkeley)