New Perspectives in Science Education

Literacy practices associated with the Internet, such as instant messaging and social networking, reflect a socially mediated way of generating meaningful content (e.g. Languages, images, sound, performances) that produces digital texts (e.g personal web pages) for for dissemination in cyberspace. Digital technologies and virtual social networks represent a range of literacy practices involving symbiotic relationships among print, visual images, acoustic, sounds, language and performance. Giddens (1990) argued that with the new media, time and space are emptied, such that social relations are disembedded from their locations and carried out across long distances.

Teaching literacy to high schools in Mexico today involves teaching both "traditional" literacy and how to read and produce under a divers subject umbrella the kinds of texts typical of the emerging information and multimedia age. Recent reports indicate that teachers in Mexico are beginning to take an interest in these new literacies of multimedia and the pedagogical tools according to the subject they are teaching. Through exposure to cutting edge multimedia, new curriculum materials, research studies, pressure from both government and industry, teachers recognizing the power use of new literacies and the new training they need to have. More than ever before, they are realizing that presentations and ideas are influenced by social, cultural, political, and historical events to make teaching and learning more dynamic and positive oral, written, reading and productive learning . Furthermore, in Mexico and many other countries, curriculum standards now recognize that students need to be literate in moving images and graphics, as well as in the print text. Nevertheless, new literacies are still not part of everyday practice in most classrooms in Mexico. (Ladisiasus, 2010)

Presenters will define new literacies and explore their place in school curricula, will explain the differences effect of the electronic use and visual communication among students and teacher's perception; such as, program, context, organization, technology production in the classrooms, and audience responses. They also will explain what is the difference between information literacy, visual literacy and media literacy and their work in a teaching-learning classroom setting.

And finally they will share some strategies on how to identify, analyze, articulate and appreciate the use and expansion of digital literacies across curricula.