Saturday, February 12, 2005
New Projects
We are currently involved in a couple of new book projects that will ensure no shortage of fun during the year ahead. One is a large collaborative distributed project. The other is more on the cottage industry scale.
The first is a joint edited handbook to be published by Erlbaum. It is The Handbook of New Literacies Research, which we are co editing with Don Leu and Julie Coiro from the University of Connecticut.
The book will assemble contributions from internationally recognized experts contracted to provide state of the art chapters on specialized topics falling into 6 main sections: Methodologies, Knowledge and Inquiry, Communication, Popular Culture, Citizenship in a Global Environment and Instructional Practices and Assessment. The Methodologies section will contain work on social semiotics, ethnography, quantitative surveys, mixed methodology, and interviews and other qualitative research approaches. Knowledge and Inquiry chapters will include work on the internet as an information source, hypertext and navigation, multiliteracies, multimedia learning and literacy, comprehension and multimodal reading. Communication chapters will include thematic discussions of early childhood education, second language education, and gender, together with specialized chapters on IM, weblogs, Chat, etc. Chapters on popular culture will address school classrooms, college students, identity and adolescence, gaming, young children, and youth culture. Citizenship will address cyber communities and cybercultures, globalization and the internet, social inclusion, and collaborative community projects. Chapters on Instructional Practices and Assessment will address learning management systems, multimodal literacy, writing in the secondary English curriculum, new literacies in math and science and assessing learning in online contexts.
We are hoping the book will be out early next year.
The second project is a primer that has been contracted by Peter Lang Publishing. In this we are teaming up with Angela Thomas to look at new literacies from pedagogical, research, and social practice perspectives. The Lang primers are quite short texts, around 50,000 words, designed for undergraduate use. Joe Kincheloe's primer on Critical Pedagogy is a great example of the genre, and we will be leaning on its qualities pretty heavily as guides for our own efforts. This book may be as close as writing a book ever gets to being 'fun' -- serious fun.
In case anyone reading this isn't aware, we edit a book series for Peter Lang called "New Literacies and Digial Epistemologies". If you are interested in having a proposal considered, please get in touch by writing to us at colin@coatepec.net or michele@coatepec.net
I also co edit a series with Michael Peters called "Inteventions: Education, Philosophy and Culture" for Paradigm Publishers. Check out the catalog for a sense of the different series in the list.
Other people have projects too *grin* and we thank Peggy Semingson for sending us the URL for a new literacy blog established by folk at the University of Texas, Austin.
Finally, thank you very much to Laurie Henry, Julie Coiro and Jill Castek for reviewing our New Literacies book in the February issue of the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. It is a privilege to be reviewed in such good company. Thank you.
