Abstract:

Technology use in society has paved a new landscape for producing texts in classrooms. In learning situations today’s youth, or the ‘net’ generation as they are often described, thrive on the utility of technology, creativity, social interaction and community (Nichols, 2007) which has enabled them to develop new ways of interacting and communicating. In student’s social lives, community writing practices have generated capacities for producing different kinds of texts which challenge traditional pedagogical practices and understandings of meaning making and communication.
With the ubiquitous presence of technology in the textual lives of people, writing practices and pedagogy need to be revisited. This presentation explores how the range of technologies and technoliterate practices has generated new possibilities for interactivity and creativity in multimodal text construction in classrooms. This in itself calls for a reconceptualisation of the term ICT, familiarly referred as Information Communication Technology. To be relevant in today’s classrooms, the paper introduces ICT as ‘Interactive Creative Technologies’ as a way to represent the rich, multi-faceted nature of literacy, technology and pedagogy as contemporary technoliterate practices move beyond information and communication.
The presentation presents research exploring the changed nature of the pedagogy of writing as design, creativity and technology converge in practice to change the face of classroom interactions around text production. Practical classroom examples and accounts from teachers and students, drawn from an 18 month case study, will be presented. These describe how seventeen teachers from six schools adjusted their pedagogical practices in writing lessons to develop capacities for enabling students to create new and dynamic texts.

Keywords:

Creativity, design elements, interaction, multimodal, multimodal writing process, pedagogy of technology, technoliteracies.