#literacies Chat

Written by Anna Smith
June 28, 2012

The #literacies chat is a weekly chat on Twitter bringing together educators, researchers and thinkers fascinated by contemporary literacies.

#literacies chats are held the 1st and 3rd Thursdays @ 8:00 PM EST.

Topics and archives are available at the new home of our #literacies chat: http://literacieschat.wordpress.com/

Below is a repost from my blog where I wrote about the origins of the #literacies chat. You can read about it and other posts here.

The Birth of an Idea

If you know me (Anna Smith) as @writerswriting, my Twitter handle, chances are you know that this last semester I have been collaborating with Emily Pendergrass (@Dr_Pendergrass), a professor at Vanderbilt, who was teaching a course in New Literacies. I was teaching a course on Content Area Literacies and together we used the hashtag #literacies to engage the topic with our pre-service teachers and the wider world.

Phase One: Once the semester came to an end, we definitely wanted to take advantage of the momentum built by having so many of our colleagues think with us about the demands and dimensions of contemporary literacies. Monica Batac (@monicabatac) suggested make the hashtag a chat…and thus our new weekly#literacies chat idea was born.

First, we opened a GoogleDoc to brainstorm ideas and within a week and with over 50 contributors, the GDoc was packed with fascinating topics ranging from the seemingly wide gap between in-school and out-of-school literacies to the role of multimodality in the digital age.

Phase Two: Drawing heavily from Meenoo Rami (@mrami2) and the way she moderates #engchat, we made a website for the #literacies chat to call home. At that site we will post introductions to the weekly topic and archives of the chats.

Phase Three: This is where you come in!

#literacies chats are held on Thursdays @ 7:00 PM EST.

You can find a description of upcoming chat topics and archives of each chat at http://literacieschat.wordpress.com/. You can also find a description of how to join us on Twitter, if you are new to the idea. We hope you join us!