Designs for Literacy – Ch. 6Pages 143-156

6341 Summer 2010 Lynda Cannedy

Images from Teaching with Technology FACTS Design

Three Parts of Literacy

•Symbols•Cognitive Processes•Discourse

Literacy as Cognitive StrategiesComprehension

• Comprehension as a product vs. comprehension as a process

• Students do not succeed at literacy events until they develop cognitive strategies necessary for interpreting symbolic information

Received information

Higher cognitive strategiesmediate evaluate

ComprehensionComplex Transactions

Can you comprehend this photo?

Photo by Cookelma from Dreamstime.com

Literacy and Discourse Forms

• Definition of discourse – – Primary mode of thought (Ch. 4)– System of possibilities ordered by rules– Specifies a set of relations between the sender, receiver, and topic

of a message • Choose form of discourse most suitable for message you wish

to convey • Decide what focus will be when interpreting experiences:

– Focus on what is happening (drama)– What happened (narrative)– What happens (exposition)– What may happen (logical argumentation)

Photo from experience-it-all.com

Discourse Forms (continued)

• Students must learn the larger patterns used within their cultural context to structure messages

• Electronic technologies have their own unique information patterns

• Literacy comes from understanding their organization and how to navigate each form, how to find information, how it is connected, and how to see potentials of a diversity of discourse forms

Photo from dreamstime.com

Discourse Forms (continued)

• Whether print, video, television, or computer forms of discourse, literacy depends on the student’s ability to work within the frame of that discourse form.

• Danger of placing more importance on the act of publishing than on the quality of the publication

• Studying the masters (models) helps students become masters.

• Good literacy designs give students opportunities to use discourse forms as patterns for communicating their own ideas and understandings.

• There is no “best” discourse form or medium.

Using the Microsoft Word ribbon samples below as a guide, what are some rules students would need to know to understand the discourse of this computer program? How does this form of discourse structure the message?

Images of ribbons from Microsoft Office Word 2007

Communicating with Symbols

• Literacy pivots on one’s ability to encode and decode content embodied in different forms of representation.– Decoding – process of translating symbolized

information into experience and thought– Encoding – process of translating experience and

thought into symbolized form– Promoting literacy in instruction combines a

balance of decoding and encoding

photo by Lindsay Cannedy

In this photo taken in Nepal, what are some examples of decoding and

encoding that you can see?

Photo from dreamstime.com

Summary

• Literacy can no longer be defined as the ability to read and write or to use print.

• Literacy is the ability to encode and decode meaning using all of the symbolic forms of representation available to a culture to communicate and create meaning.

• Designing opportunities to support literacy include understanding and using a variety of symbolic systems, mastering cognitive strategies for getting meaning from symbolic forms, and understanding and interpreting patterns used by a culture to organize symbols into larger texts or discourse forms.

Attributions

• All photos taken by author unless otherwise specified

• Chapter 6 information and text taken from Teaching with Technology by Priscilla Norton and Karin M. Wiburg (2003)

• Presentation prepared with Microsoft Office Power Point 2007