2. WEB LITERACY THROUGH SOCIO-CONSTRUCTIVISM

2.2 WEB LITERACY AS A SOCIAL PRACTICE

The web is one of the new and influential technologies and media environments that surround us today. The Internet is a worldwide network of computer networks, which offers many services to its users, such as e-mail and the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is the Internet resource that uses hypertext and handles the web pages. In the present study, we use the shorter form of this resource, the web. Web literacy, thus, refers to reading and writing connected to the web. A closely related term, Internet literacy, although sometimes used as a synonym of web literacy, thus refers to literacy connected to all of the different services of the Internet. Accordingly, the term web literacy is only related to the web and not, for example, to the e-mail.

Many recent studies on literacy have addressed the question of the social construction of literacy. For example, it has been argued that "web literacy should be understood as literacies, and furthermore as socially situated practices rather than technologically determined conventions of reading and writing" (Karlsson 2002). Literacy as a social practice means that it is always bound to the societal and social contexts of different domains of life, and is historically situated and constantly evolving. (Barton and Hamilton 1998, Warschauer 1999, The New London Group 2000). Following this view, web literacy in the present study is understood as a set of social and cultural practices of reading and writing in relation to different media objects on the web.

In order to understand what is meant by these practices of reading and writing, we will take a look at a definition of literacy practices by Barton and Hamilton (1998). According to them (1998:6-7), literacy practices refer to what people do with literacy. That is, why, how and for what purpose we read and write. Literacy practices also involve how people understand and talk about literacy and their awareness of constructions and discourses of literacy. Barton and Hamilton (1998:247-251) identify a number of literacy practices such as personal communication, private leisure or sense making. The practices, then, are realised in literacy events, various activities where literacy has a role. Examples of literacy events on the web are searching information for academic purposes, reading on-line newspapers, sending web cards, or maintaining a personal homepage. Web literacy practices, then, refer to why and how we read and write, what we want to accomplish by using the web, and how we understand the construction of information on the web. These practices are internal to individual, and affected by personal values, attitudes and feelings. What makes them social is that they are always bound to the social relationships to other web users, as well as affected by the role the society puts on different literacy practices on the web.

Web literacy as a social practice is grounded on a socio-constructive view of knowledge construction. In this paradigm, individuals and communities construct knowledge. In other words, knowledge in every community and society is social, and based on shared conventions. In constructing knowledge, individuals seek this shared knowledge. Also individual literacy practices such as reading a book or using computer software can be seen as social practices, as the individual is seen as interacting with the social constructions that have affected the production of the book or the software. (Tynjälä 1999:148-149). And only through social participation the individuals internalise knowledge (Vygotsky 1978, Tynjälä 1999: 155).

The web can be seen as one large community of users from all over the world. On a macro level, this community shares the basic conventions of using the web, such as conventions of navigation, storing information and interaction. In addition, there are many sub-communities on the web, such as communities of professionals, which can be either local or global. A web user, thus, is a part of many communities, the members of which often have shared social conventions and literacy norms. By participating in the discourses of different communities, also new, perhaps less proficient members of the communities have a chance to acquire these shared conventions. Reading and writing on the web is thus a process in which the web user uses his or her prior knowledge to integrate the new information into his or her prior knowledge according to shared conventions.

If we understand web literacy as a social practice it also follows that it is historically situated and constantly changing. Changes in literacy reflect the changes in various areas of society: in personal lives, in communities, in education and in working lives. (The New London Group 2000:10-19). At least in many western societies, the web is an influential medium causing changes in literacy practices of working, public and private lives. The web functions as a new source of information demanding new strategies of handling this information, as well as brings along new ways of communicating. Reading and writing related to work and personal lives is ever more often connected to using the web, and web literacy practices have become an integral part of society functions (see eg. Warschauer 1999:4).

At the individual level, literacy practices of a person are also influenced by his or her own history of literacy. Current literacy practices always draw on traditional ones. The way we make meanings is affected by our own life history, and our life history is affected by our literacy practices. (Barton and Hamilton 1998:12-13). Being web literate requires an understanding of how multimodal hypertexts on the web affect reading and writing practices. Although web literacy practices are different from traditional ones due to the nature of the medium, they are affected and built on traditional ways of reading and writing. On the web, it can be noticed that established practices are not always easy to change. This might be why it is not always easy to read the multilinear texts on the web, and on the other hand, why web texts often are produced in the traditional linear form without exploiting the many possibilities that the medium has to offer.

The view of web literacy as a social practice can be seen to have several implications in terms of building a learning space for Finnish university students to learn web literacy on the web. To mention a few, university studies involve more and more on-line learning and using the web. The outcome of the present study, the learning space Netro, provides students a chance to participate in real on-line learning. In Netro, the learners have the chance to become members of an on-line learning community and together construct shared knowledge through various activities of reading and writing related to the multimodal content of the web. The learners are also guided to reflect on their individual literacy practices through their own history of reading and writing, as they are encouraged to reflect on, for instance, how they read on-line and how they search information, as well as to think about how to use the information found, how to critically approach and evaluate the multiple modes of representation on the web. This way the learning space aims at supporting the development of the kind of students Castells (1996:371) calls interacting, that is, critical and knowledgeable users of the web, who are able to adjust their reading and writing to the social conventions of reading and writing on the web.

As we have now examined web literacy as a social practice of knowledge construction, it has to be noted that web literacy is only one of the multiple literacies needed within societies, and it involves various subliteracies in itself. Many recent literacy studies use the term 'literacies' in plural, refering to multiple, different kinds of literacies needed in different contexts (see Barton and Hamilton 1998, Lemke 1998, The New London Group 2000). The different literacies are often named on the basis of the media or the symbolic systems they involve, for example, web literacy referring to literacy on the web, or visual literacy referring to images and other visual symbols. One of the many socio-constructive approaches to modern literacies is offered by The New London Group (2000) in their pedagogy of Multiliteracies. Next, we will examine the tools this approach offers to web literacy.