social media and networking (such as Facebook, Twitter and live news streams), and an exponential explosion in mobile devices, currently circa seven billion, with almost 40% of the world's population now using the Internet (ITU, 2013).
Facebooks global reach in 2011 In economic terms, what this has created is:
The largest single market place in history and you have access to almost every single person on it instantaneously... this participatory web... is fundamentally changing how we need to do business because participation in the medium is... changing behaviour and expectations for customers, employees, stakeholders, everyone...( Ross, 2008).
What does this mean for literacy teachers, learners and researchers?
Web 2.0 is intrinsically dialogic: social networks, supply to demand, ratings, reviews, comments, posts, polls, shared media, global payment and dispute resolution facilities, recruitment processes, liaison with state and professional agencies. Knowledge and cultural products are created collaboratively online through wikis, blogs, podcasts, shared cloud file-making, editing and storage of mixed media, notes, documents, brainstorm and mind-mapping facilities. The latter are inherently literate social practices now carried out in a parallel virtual world which is becoming integral to human functioning in society. Adult literacies are evolving hand- in-hand with technological change (RaPAL, 2011). As Purcell-Gates and colleagues (2004, 2000) found, adults in learning programs that focus instruction around authentic literacy practices show greater changes than those from programs which do not. As professionals in the field, this dynamic literacies environment presents us with evolutionary challenges in curriculum, content and design.
Sociocultural schools of thought
Sociocultural schools of thought (Mercer and Littleton, 2007; Warschauer, 1997) argue that structures of knowledge and meaning are co-constructed through dialogue, and that in teaching and learning we can engage language and consequent literate practice to scaffold students' participation in higher cognitive thinking processes. Modern technological developments provide us with a wide selection of interactive
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