Edith Ackermann
Date de publication : mars 2007
Growing up digital (Negroponte, 1995, Harel, 1998) changes the ways in which children explore, express, and exchange their ideas and feelings across time and space. I draw examples from literacy to tell the tale of what it could mean to be media-smart and socially adapted in tomorrow’s world, and what it takes to become so.
In what follows, I first take a short incursion into children’s own creative uses of speech and writing, with a focus on the language games that children play. Drawing from Ong’s concept of “secondary orality” (Ong, 1982), I then gauge the potentials of digital technologies to support “literacies beyond print” (Olson, 1994). Activities such as Netting, Spriting, and Mudding, and environments such as interactive story tellers/builders, and E-Puppeteering provide new opportunities for children, especially poor readers and writers, to indulge in dialogic writing, or text-based speech, using their strengths as narrators as a lever to overcome their fears as writers (Lankshear, 1997)…