The International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments

Abstract

The dramatic multiplication of computer, information, communication, and multimedia technologies has been changing everything from the ways people work, to the ways they communicate with each other and spend their leisure time. This technological revolution is often interpreted as the beginnings of a knowledge or information society, and therefore ascribes education a central role in every aspect of life. It poses tremendous challenges to educators to rethink their basic tenets, to deploy the new technologies in creative and productive ways, and to restructure schooling to respond constructively and progressively to the technological and social changes currently underway. At the same time, important demographic and socio-political changes are taking place throughout the world. Emigration patterns have created the challenge of providing people from diverse races, classes, and backgrounds with the tools and competencies to enable them to succeed and participate in an ever more complex and changing world. In this chapter, I argue that educators need to cultivate multiple literacies for contemporary technological and multicultural societies, that teachers need to develop new literacies of diverse sorts, including a more fundamental importance for print literacy, to meet the challenge of restructuring education for a hi-tech, multicultural society, and global culture. In a period of dramatic technological and social change, education needs to help produce a variety of types of literacies to make current pedagogy relevant to the demands of the contemporary era. As new technologies are altering every aspect of our society and culture, we need to comprehend and make use of them both to understand and transform our worlds. In particular, by introducing multiple literacies to empower individuals and groups traditionally excluded, education could be reconstructed to make it more responsive to the challenges of a democratic and multicultural society.