Friday, May 08, 2009
New collection hot off the press by Anne Burke & Bobbi (Roberta) Hammett!
Anne and Bobbi address an important--and often overlooked--dimension of new literacies and education: assessment. Their edited collection is titled Assessing New Literacies: Perspectives from the Classroom, and focusses on presenting a rich range of approaches to meaningfully assessing new literacies in classroom settings.
From the back blurb:
New literacies, globally popular among children and adolescents in and out of school contexts, are challenging educators and institutions to rethink pedagogies. As educators begin to embrace the pedagogical possibilities of multimodal texts and digital practices, they are exploring the complexities of assessing these new literacies. The essays in this book explore what it means to assess the sophisticated textual engagements of new literacies, including reading and writing online, social networking, gaming, multimodal composing, and creating virtual identities. Chapters offer practical examples of new literacies, and examine how assessment provides insight into the diverse ways in which language is conceived, valued, and used to inform the literate lives of its twenty-first century users. Scholars and educators will find this collection full of rich understanding of the assessment concerns raised by new communication practices, youth culture, digital engagements, and semiotic diversification.
A key strength of the book is the range of perspectives it offers. It's also really international in its reach, with chapter authors hailing from Canada, Australia, England, the U.S., and elsewhere. Here's quick look at the contents:
1. Introduction: Rethinking assessment and new literacies
Anne Burke, Roberta F. Hammett
2. Assessing multimodal texts
Eve Bearne
3. Checkmarks on the screen: Questions of assessment and new literacies in the digital age
Anne Burke
4. Making the invisible visible: Assessing the visual as spaces of learning
Maureen Kendrick, Harriet Mutonyi and Roberta McKay
5. New literacies and assessments in middle school social studies content area instruction: Issues for classroom practices
Margaret C. Hagood, Emily N. Skinner, Melissa Venters, and Benjamin Yelm
6. My life on Facebook: Assessing the art of online social networking
Jennifer Rowsell
7. Distributed assessment in OurSpace: This is not a rubric
Jill Kedersha-McClay and Margaret Mackey
8. Aligning digital literacies with e-identities: New spaces for quality in learning, teaching and assessment
Kay Kimber and Claire Wyatt-Smith
9. Digital tools: Assessing digital communication and providing feedback to student writers
Richard Beach, Linda Clemens, and Kirsten Jamsen
10. New literacies and teacher education
Roberta F. Hammett
Afterword
Julian Sefton-Green
