New Technologies/New Literacies: reconstructing education for the new millennium

In a period of dramatic technological and social change, educators need to foster a variety of new types of literacies to make education relevant to the demands of a new millennium. My assumptions are that new technologies are altering every aspect of our society and culture, and that we need to comprehend and make use of them both to understand and transform our worlds. Introducing new literacies to empower individuals and groups traditionally excluded would require a reconstruction of education to make it more responsive to the challenges of a democratic and multicultural society. This project would involve a strong emphasis on print literacy, combined with development of media literacy, computer and information literacies, and an expanded concept of multiple literacies to help reconstruct and democratize education and society. As we enter a new millennium, most people are by now aware that we are in the midst of one of the most dramatic technological revolutions in history that is changing everything from the ways that we work, communicate, and spend our leisure time. The technological revolution centers on computer, information, communication, and multimedia technologies, is often interpreted as the beginnings of a knowledge or information society, and therefore ascribes education a central role in every aspect of life. This Great Transformation poses tremendous challenges to educators to rethink their basic tenets, to deploy the new technologies in creative and productive ways, and to restructure schooling to respond constructively and progressively to the technological and social changes that we are now experiencing. At the same time that we are undergoing technological revolution, important demographic and socio-political changes are occurring in the United States and throughout the world. Emigration patterns have brought an explosion of new peoples into the U.S. in recent decades and the country is now more racially and ethnically diverse, more multicultural, than ever before. This creates the challenge ISSN 1047-6210 (print)/ISSN 1470-1286 (online)/00/030245-21 Ó 2000 Graduate School of Education, University of Queensland DOI: 10.1080/10476210020021608