Literacies in virtuality

I notice that yesterday's Prezi doesn't always show up. It seems to in Firefox and Safari, but not in Explorer. Strange. So today I'm showcasing a student video that should work...I think it's really good! Does it link well to the second seminar series theme? Well it might, and that all depends on your conception of literacy. Recently Gillen and Barton (2010) seem to have been quoted a lot, defining digital literacy as 'the constantly changing practices through which people make traceable meanings using digital technologies.' Throughout the series we have been examining these practices, noting their multimodal nature and the ways in which the boundaries between reading and writing, between production and consumption are repeatedly blurred. It's also become apparent that within many digital environments the text is not only multiple but contains individual points of view. Each inhabitant sees and experiences Second Life from a unique perspective; no two Twitter streams will look the same, an so on. Point of view becomes an ever more important dimension as readers and writers construct their own journeys through the textual landscape. Along with this we've noted the development of new narrative vehicles and encountered complex questions of authorship, and repeatedly asked how these new kinds of texts map on to curriculum areas like media studies, English, drama or literacy. So in some ways, Helen Nixon summed it up when she asked how far can we stretch the term literacy before it ceases to be useful?