Abstract

Despite what students and teachers believe about their own engagement with New Literacies and their connection with print-based, school sanctioned literacies, New Literacies and print-based literacies are not unconnected (Alvermann, 2001; Alexander, 2006; Baird & Fisher, 2005-2006).Adolescents are able to navigate adeptly the old and New Literacies (Lankshear &Knobel, 2006). They move through and between paper-based and New Literacies for academic, economic, and social purposes at school, at work, and at home. Given the quantity of time students spend online, it seems foolish to ignore the role of the Internet in the lives of students and the effects of enabling the instantiation of that role in students’ academic lives. This paper describes the experience of introducing a blog into an English literature classroom in an alternative education classroom over the course of two years and how the students there reconstructed the blog into a third space for identity construction. It also discusses the effects of student online literacies on pedagogy and students and to what use knowledge of that role can be put in the classroom.