Week 1 - What is literacy?

According to the Concise Oxford dictionary (1929)  literacy is defined as the ability to read and write. I must admit that today as I was walking towards the lecture theatre, I thought we would be discussing the conventional and traditional ability to read, understand and use information BUT the term has come to take a much broader meaning.

Sitting behind my desk at school for the past 17 years, I always thought literacy was just composed of the written word but today it has broadened my horizons to think beyond that notion. According to Kalantzis and Cope (2012) text can infer meaning and context by using different and combined modes of meaning (written, visual, spatial, gestural, tactile, audio and oral). Until now, I have never considered or recognised the multimodalities in text as described by Kalantzis and Cope (2012). Before today, I did not even realise that snapping a photo of my macaroon and uploading to instagram was a form of literacy!





Personally, Scrapbooking (visual and tactile mode of literacy) is a very enjoyable and creative way of mine to preserve memories.

  





Additionally, my corkboard is a form of visual literacy allowing me to preserve special memories including photos, certificates, messages, postcards and inspirational quotes and phrases. 

    

Record of everyday literacy practices - http://padlet.com/wall/p7mco3h6cn

Social Connections - we use texts to communicate with each other

- With the access to new technology (instagram), the use of images has become more prominent. Having the capacity to take photos on your phone has affected the way we communicate hence our comminication is much more visual and less linguistic.

- Frequent use of social networking sites such as facebook and twitter. Gone are the days of letter writing as social means of communication!

- In recent times, I have noticed we have become less able to express our emotions into words hence we use emoticons to express ourselves.

- Learning how to decode maps (particularly around UQ) is another form of text I frequently engage with. Maps are a spatial and visual text.  



In this age of globilisation, it is important to recognise not only the multimodality of text but also the social diversity in our current literacy practices (Phillips, 2013). I have come to the realisation that we use different language styles for different contexts; not just different cultural languages but different styles. For example, I find that my use of words, tone and formality is different, adjusted, and used appropriately in regards to sending an email to my course co-ordinator (formal and polite manner) and texting a friend (slang dialogue, abbreviations such as LOL).

Even now as I am typing this out, I am trying to wrap my head around everything I learnt today. It was enlightening and opened my eyes to a whole new perspective of literacy.

References

Kalantzis, M., & Cope, B. (2012). Literacies. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.

Phillips, L. (2013). Week 1: The what and why of literacies [Powerpoint slides]. EDUC1707, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia.

Skyes, J.B. (1976). The concise oxford dictionary. Walton Street, Oxford: Oxford University Press.