Web 2.0 and emergent multiliteracies

Students are, increasingly, digital content producers, and participate extensively in evolving online social networks. The emergence of the former represents subtle changes in students' experience of images, audience, copyright, ownership of learning, and technology. Experiencing the latter places students in an awkward position in terms of pre-Web conceptions of social space, and especially concerning privacy and expression in a highly visual environment. This article considers how pedagogies confront emergent Web 2.0 habits, and situates them in the context of other architectures to represent very different models for information architecture, intellectual property, software development, gaming, and learning. Students who write words on paper, yes- but who also compose words and images and create audio files on Web logs (blogs), in word processors, with video editors and Web editors and in e-mail and on presentation software and in instant messaging and on listservs and on bulletin boards-and no doubt in whatever genre will emerge in the next ten minutes. Note that no one is making anyone do any of this writing. (Yancey, 2004).