Humanities Express

New Media Literacy

"To be fully literate in the 21^st century one must have fluency with a complex vernacular that incorporates sound, image, moving image, and interactivity, as well as the written word."

New media texts and the composing practices that produce them compel us to transform how we teach and how our students learn. As print, still images, video, sound, and animation converge on our screens, our curricula need to embrace and reflect critically upon new tools that allow even schoolchildren to produce basic multimodal communications. At Ohio State, the Digital Media Project (DMP), under the direction of Associate Professor Scott Lloyd DeWitt (English), has provided teachers and students in the English Department with a laboratory for studying how computer technology and emerging media are changing the ways that we read, view, compose, conduct research, and create works of art—in short, for studying how new media are transforming literacy.

In the summer of 2004, with funding from the Battelle Endowment for Technology and Human Affairs (BETHA), DeWitt convened twenty-six faculty and graduate students from eleven universities to map out a vision for teaching new media literacy. This spring, he has been working with graduate students in English to develop a new media curriculum for a first-year composition course to be offered for the first time next year.

With additional funding from Ohio State´s tuition set-aside program, the DMP has redesigned and re-equipped one of its five classrooms to support new courses focused on collaborative multimodal composition. That classroom now contains high-end computers and monitors; image-, video-, and audio-editing software; scanners; videotape and DVD players; and a ceiling-mounted projector. From the DMP office, students can check out digital video and still cameras and digital audio recorders for use in their projects. The technology-enhanced classroom allows students in one class, for example, to study the evolving genre of documentary and create original multimodal documentary texts.

For more information about the teaching of new media literacy in the Department of English, please visit the Digital Media Project´s Web site at http://english.osu.edu/programs/dmp/.