Literature and reading are being transformed by digital technologies. With a focus on Australian literature in its transnational context, these resources will help teachers and students to learn about and practice new ways of reading and writing literature.
About
Education has traditionally been split along the lines of the 3Rs. Reading and wRiting was for the English classroom and ‘Rithmatic was not. As digital technologies have become increasingly entwined in how literature is circulated and received - and even created - statistical, computational, and algorithmic dynamics have become integral to how we read and write. Literature has always played an important role in English education because of its special aesthetic, moral, political, and cultural qualities. With literature increasingly enacted in new digital forms and systems, it can continue to play this role, but only if students are empowered to work in this 3(R)-dimensional world, with the digital literacies necessary to understand and create.
To enable this learning, the project creates resources for digital literary literacy, using Australian literature as its playground. That focus is both pragmatic - because it is a compulsory component of secondary education, and a vibrant aspect of tertiary literary studies - and important - because Australian literature remains one of the key ways in which we think about ourselves. The three exercises in digital literary literacy that this project facilitates are as follows:
In all of these exercises, Australian literature is conceived in its transnational context, such that the exploration of national and regional identities and cultures is connected to global systems and flows.