I  just returned from another American Educational Research Association (AERA) conference. While in Chicago, I attended several sessions focused around literacy education, teacher education, and critical pedagogy and noticed digital literacy practices were discussed in all sessions. Interestingly, in the studies discussed digital technology was used not only as a tool to teach but a tool to re-imagine the definition and uses of literacy practices. Interesting sessions I attended included:

*Digital Storytelling as Method and Narrative Assemblage (Korina Jocson, University of Massachusetts)

 *Digital Storytelling as Racial Justice: Digital Hopes for Deconstructing Whiteness in Teacher Education (Cheryl Matias, University of Colorado & Tanetha Grosland, Morgan State University)

*Digital Authoring: Negotiations of Identity, Agency, and Power Among Girls Resettles as Refugees from Thailand (Delila Omerbasic, University of Utah)

 *Digital Storytelling in Preservice Teacher Education: Diverse Understandings of Writing, Pedagogy, and Meaning Making (Sandra Schamroth Abrams, Saint John’s University)

Benjamin Herold from the Education Week blog noticed a similar trend at this year’s conference. On his blog he said, “Digital reading and early literacy were among the hot topics at the annual meeting of the American Education Research Association, held here last week.” He describes the findings of four studies which study digital reading and early literacy. He noticed a common thread which ran through many of these papers: “It’s important to look at how digital devices, apps, and e-books are actually being used in classrooms, and the most promising literacy practices with these new tools involve lots of human-to-human interaction.”

Read Herold’s blogpost here:

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/DigitalEducation/2015/04/ipads_e-readers_literacy_research.html