My excuse for not blogging is typically that I’m so busy at work. But really I think it’s because I’m not reading other blogs like I used to. I amaze myself with my ability to be surrounded with so many intelligent, productive and energetic people and many of them are bloggers. I get so much information and ideas from blogs. I still use Feedly to aggregate all my RSS feeds, so getting to what I want to read is not difficult. I’ve even been placing feeds for journals in there and can easily pull up any journal to which my library subscribes and read online.

I’ve been busy with research, too.

I’m looking at concepts like multiliteracies, critical literacy and information literacy. Information literacy is what libraries teach about how to find locate, evaluate, create information and it’s way more complex that that makes it sound. It incorporates things likes copyright and citations and using databases and keyword searching and when/how to use Google Scholar…

Multiliteracy is, so far as I’ve seen, completely unrelated to information literacy but I don’t know that it should be. Multiliteracy is a concept that was developed by the New London Group and essentially tells us that literacy is about more than being able to read printed words. Its about being able to read and acquire information from emoticons, hairstyles, the interplay of words and images in a book, the use of colors in different cultures, signage… And, in reading this wide variety of text, in realizing the cultural variances in these texts, we then get into literacies such as critical literacy that requires us to enter a literacy experience on a peer to peer level with an author rather than viewing them as an expert. We question the choices they’ve made in what to include, or not include and look at the structure of power. Who is voiceless? How does one person or one group maintain power? Consider that in the book you’re currently reading and see how much more you get out of the story.

Since the late 1990s, educators have been incorporating these strategies into their classrooms and critical literacy is

still being taught. What I’m noticing is that typically, it’s taught in classrooms with high Latino and African American populations. I have to believe that for critical literacy to truly be relevant, white students have to be included as well. All citizens in a democracy need to understand who is entitled, who is disenfranchised, how those roles play out in society and what responsibilities we all have.

Wouldn’t in be interesting to develop a critical literacy lesson based upon an event on Twitter?

Books, images, texts, Tweets, blogs… INFORMATION is powerful!