Speaker: Dr. Rodney Jones
Date and Time: Thursday, June 14, 2018, 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Location: Ponderosa Commons Oak House, Multipurpose Room 2012
Digital Literacies in Four Objects
Many people think of ‘digital literacy’ as an abstract set of technical and information processing skills that can be applied across a range of situations from filling out a job application online to spotting ‘fake news’ on Facebook. A ‘digital literacies’ approach, on the other hand, focuses on the ways digital technologies mediate specific social practices and influence how we are able to address specific social problems in the physical world including risks to our health, economic inequality, violence and discrimination, and environmental degradation. In this talk I will describe how my own understanding of digital literacies has developed over the past two decades through my involvement with a number of ‘real world’ issues such as HIV prevention, adolescent drug abuse, the design of physical learning spaces in schools, the role of digital technologies in political activism, and the growing role of algorithms in determining whom we interact with and what counts as knowledge. I will explain how these encounters have helped to define my theoretical framework for digital literacies, known as mediated discourse analysis, an approach which examines how media affect the concrete social actions people are able to take in their communities and seeks to work with communities to increase their capacity to confront barriers to positive action. I will then explore how I think this approach can complement and enhance the practice-based, activist approach to literacy studies evident in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at UBC.
Dr. Jones is Professor of Sociolinguistics and New Media and Head of the Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics at the University of Reading.