Week 1 Reading Response: Stepping Into a Future of Collaboration

There are so much information for the Chapter one of New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Social Learning by Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel that I took 3 days to finish reading it.

There are certainly quite a few vocabulary that I have never heard of before, such as “folksonomy", "taxonomy" and "cyberspatial-postindustrial”. The process that I comprehend the new vocabulary exactly reflected one of the main concept for Chapter one: "Understanding literacies from a sociocultural perspective means that reading and writing can only be understood in the contexts of social, cultural, political, economic,historical practices to which they are integral, of which they are a part." Without the detailed examples of Flickr tagging and practice of tagging a picture, I would not be able to truly understand the meaning of folksonomy, which is a system in which users apply public tags to online items, typically to aid them in re-finding those items. This can give rise to a classification system based on those tags and their frequencies, in contrast to a taxonomic classification specified by the owners of the content when it is published.

I also find it noteworthy when the Lankshear and Knobel compare the two mindsets.The new emerging mindset has the characters of "decentered", collaborative" and" enable service". I couldn't help to think the rapid growing business of Uber and Airbnb. The sharing economy challenges traditional notions of private ownership and is instead based on the shared production. That is what "decentered and collaborative stands for here. Both company does not own the production( car and houses), instead of providing service to enable people find alternative options. That is what "enable service" stands for. The origins of sharing economy were in not-for-profit initiatives such as Wikipedia (2001) and Couchsurfing and Freecycle (both 2003).

Well, I ask myself, if this is the direction the new literacy is heading to, what changes will it bring to my classroom? How to provide students with more authentic culture and social backgrounds to enhance their understanding of the vocabulary? How do I decenter my role as the instructor and instead invite the students to be the contributors of their learning process? What is the other way to have students work collaboratively beside using Google Doc? What kind of service I am providing to my students? This is only my week one of ILT5430 course, I have not found the answer to my questions. I will have to keep on going.