1. INTRODUCTION

Today's university students are faced with new learning environments and diverse social practices within these environments. The World Wide Web¹ is one of the multiple media. Technology seems to have a more prominent role in learning than ever before; more and more often students take distance courses, operate with learning platforms, apply to courses on-line and search web materials for seminar papers and essays. These new forms of social practices, as well as the vast amount of information (for information glut, see eg. Koski 1998) the web poses on us, demand new forms of reading and writing.

Using the web requires a variety of new forms of meaning making, multiple literacies. One approach to describe reading and writing on the web is the concept of Multiliteracies (The New London Group 2000)², which involves, for instance, cultural and linguistic diversity, multimodality and a variety of text forms, dialects and genres that are associated with the medium. In addition, the web offers its users a chance of being a member of new on-line cultures and communities on a global scale. The new social practices associated with the web are not, of course, restricted to studying and research, but are also relevant at work and other spheres of life.

We can only predict the kinds of forms of society today's students need to live and work in. Nevertheless, there is a threat of inequality when it comes to future citizenship and the capabilities to actively participate in the social practices which require multiple literacies (see eg. Castells 1996, Warschauer 1999). According to Castells (1996:371) "the multimedia world will be populated by two essentially distinct populations: the interacting and the interacted", the distinction being in the active and critical selecting of discourses and the more passive form of accepting prepacked choices. In other words, we need to facilitate the development of critical, reflective, conscious and self-directive users of the web, rather than dependence on external instruction and authorities. Naturally these qualities are applicable to any other real-life context in addition to the web, and can be developed in all real-life situations. These generic qualities are often referred to as transferable skills and can be seen as a prerequisite for the development of who Castells calls the interacting.

Whose task is it, then, to support the use of technology and media? When offering new learning possibilities that are supported by technology, do we teachers and lecturers merely assume that the learners have the skills for using the web to begin with? Warschauer (1999:21) calls for the responsibility of educators and schooling systems to teach students to become knowledgeable users of electronic media and critical readers and writers. This is important because the nature of pedagogical practices will have an impact on who becomes the interacting and who becomes the interacted in the network society. Unless educators develop appropriate pedagogies for the new electronic media and communication technologies, it will be corporate experts, for example, software engineers, that will determine how and what people will learn, and what literacy is (Luke C. 2000:71). Naturally, it is the educators who ought to be the ones providing students with the strategies for making use of these new multimodal resources.

In Finland, these new challenges in the area of literacy and literacy pedagogy have been addressed to an extent. Already in 1995, a National Strategy for Education and Research was published by the Ministry of Education in Finland to ensure equal and high-standard basic education, as well as to make Finland one of the leading societies of know-how and knowledge. The follow up strategy published in 1999 for the years 2000-2004 (Education, Training and Research in the Information Society, 1999) calls for the integration of media literacy in all-round education by the end of year 2004.

The aim of this study is to create an electronic learning space which supports the development of web literacy. The overall framework is socio-constructivism, which means that we want the learning space to support social modes of learning, to be more specific, collaborative knowledge building processes (Lave and Wenger 1991, Scardamalia and Bereiter 1994, 1999). The individual aim of the learning space is awareness raising (Wenden 1998, 2001), more specifically, raising awareness on aspects of web literacy. The electronic learning space Netro can be regarded as a public vehicle which takes the learners on a journey towards web literacy as reading and writing on the web.

Netro integrates web literacy into university language and communication teaching and attempts to meet the new challenges of literacy education. As the role of language teaching at the university language centre is to support university students in their studies and working life by offering them tools for managing diverse text worlds, it also follows that part of this education needs to support the students to transfer and further develop their skills to manage the web.

The present study is organised as follows. We will begin by presenting web literacy as a socio-constructive concept and by discussing the concept in the light of previous research. Based on the variety of definitions of web literacy, we will then present a model of three interrelated fields of web literacy: skills in using the web, content knowledge of the multimodal medium, and awareness of oneself as a user of that medium. This model will function as a tool for the pedagogical goals of the learning space.

In chapter 3 we will discuss our pedagogical premises which guided us in the planning and construction of the learning space. First, we will focus on learning web literacy as autonomy development and describe the cognitive processes involved in learning. Then, we will place the individual into the social context and introduce the collaborative meaning making processes through which also web literacy can be seen to develop. Since Netro is an electronic learning space, we will also elaborate on the role of technology as a vehicle for meaning making. We will conclude the chapter by portraying how this pedagogical thinking is implemented in Netro.

Chapter 4 introduces the actual electronic learning space Netro. We will describe the context in which the learning space is developed and present its general objectives. After this, the structure of Netro is introduced in relation to the goals of the individual sections of the learning space.

A test drive of Netro took place in May 2003 in the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. The course of this optional language course is presented in chapter 5, in which we will also give the learners a voice by reporting some of their perceptions of the concept of web literacy.

We will conclude the study by discussing the possible strengths and weaknesses of the study through the diverse roles of teachers when working in the space of electronic learning. We will also make recommendations for future research as well as for those who plan to develop something similar.

¹ The World Wide Web is later referred to as the web.

² The conceptual framework of Multiliteracies being referred to in this study is the result of the work of the New London Group, an international group of specialists in education, critical literacy and discourse analysis. In this study we refer to this work by referring to the New London Group, the editors (B. Cope and M. Kalantzis) of the “Multiliteracies” article collection published in 2000, as well as the individual authors of the collection (eg. J.P. Gee, G. Kress and C. Luke).