My column on Empowering Learners in the Reader/Writer Nature of the Digital Informational Space was just published in Volume 58, Issue 2 of JAAL. In this column I make the case that educators have the opportunity to empower learners as not only readers, but writers of online information. To do this we need to move students (and ourselves) from content consumers, to content curators, to content construction.

As a supplement to this column I invited five experts to spend some time discussing the broader impact of the details presented. The end result are short video segments of the experts responding to four questions about the implications of this work. Down below you can find the questions and video from one of the sessions.

Four Questions for Jennifer Rowsell

Jennifer Rowsell is the Canada Research Chair in Multiliteracies and an Associate Professor in the Brock University Faculty of Education.

• If we were to develop a classroom in which students could be empowered to read and write online text…what would it look like? 
• In the column I use the word remix, or mashup…what are the ramifications of having students not only read, but teaching youth and young adults they can respond, re-write, or reconstruct information they read online?
• How do we change policy and pedagogy to speak more to adolescents, teenagers, and adults? 
• People say the only constant is change in technology and literacy. Is there any way teachers can prepare their learning space for these changes based on the principles of multiliteracies, multimodality, and design?

 

Image CC by Leo Reynolds