technologies demand of students - such as finding, selecting, processing and
presenting information from the internet and other sources (Somekh et. al, 2001a). I
want to suggest that the multimodal character and facilities of new technology require
that traditional (print-based) concepts of literacy be reshaped as what it means to be
literate in the digital era of the twenty-first century is different than what was needed
previously (Gardener, 2000). If school literacy is to be relevant to the demands of the
multimodal environment of the larger world, it must move away from the reduction
of literacy to ‘a static series of technical skills’ or risk ‘fostering a population of
functional illiterates’ (McClay, 2002). In short, school literacy needs to be expanded
to reflect the semiotic systems that young people use (Unsworth, 2001).
Many others have argued that the concept of literacy needs to be expanded beyond
language to account for the demands of new technology. In my opinion this has led to
the fragmentation of the concept of literacy into multi-literacies, visual literacy,
digital literacy, and beyond to cultural literacy, emotional literacy and intellectual
literacy. I argue against this pluralising of the concept of literacy, and suggest that to
talk about learning with new technology as demanding substantially different
‘literacies’ (Zammitt and Callow, 2000), although a call for radicalism, serves to
accommodate the new within the domain of the old rather than to redefine it. I think
that the move to multiple literacies is an inadequate solution as it maintains and
reiterates the concept of ‘real’ literacy as linguistic and mono-modal, and serves to
isolate and fragment the complex work of what it means to be literate in a multimodal
world. Students who are engaged with multimodal texts in the classrooms are not
interpreting image in isolation of writing, or digital medium texts from print texts,
rather they are engaged in the task of interpretation in a multimodal and multimedia
environment. To separate visual literacy, moving image literacy, and so on maintains
the status quo in which literacy as language remains intact and boundaried: it just has
more ‘competition’ in the Communicational world.
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