Literacy is a social practice affecting every aspect of our lives. Our use of emerging digital texts and tools define civic and public engagement in our participatory culture. The purpose of the hybrid class is to highlight the shifting nature of literacy and social practices as new digital texts and tools emerge everyday.

As an LEP Tier I class we will demonstrate technological fluencies necessary for citizenry in the twenty-first century.

The Technology

flickr photo shared by See-ming Lee 李思明 SML under a Creative Commons ( BY-SA ) license

We will be using web annotations, blogs, video, a class website. BTW you will pick up a little HTML/CSS on the way. Promise.

The Web has fundamentally shifted the ways we read, write, and participate. We will confront this shift by making with new tools for language that students confront every day. This class uses three basic tools:

• Blogging. Every student will set up a website as a blogging platform. Each week you will be asked to post twice. There are no parameters. No word count. If you want to use images, video, quotes, or summaries it is up to you. I just ask you think critically and base your analysis within the texts we read. For those who like a little more structure each week your peers will post possible writing topics.

• Annotations We will socially annotate all of our readings using a tool called hypothes.is. This will allow us to share insights and debate the meanings of texts. All annotations are openly licensed for reuse. If you wish to remain private you may use a pseudonym (key shared only with me) or provide a hard copy of paper based annotations.

• Class Stream We have a private class stream. Each person will join. We will use it to share the artifacts we create and debate the issues at hand.