New media literacies

www.digitallearning.macfound.org

new media literacies: a set of cultural competencies and social skills that young people need in the new media landscape. Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement.The new literacies almost all involve social skills developed through collaboration and networking.These skills build on the foundation of traditional literacy, research skills, technical skills, and critical analysis skills taught in the classroom.

The new skills include:

• Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
• Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
• Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
• Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
• Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.
• Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
• Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
• Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
• Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
• Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information
• Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.