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In the digital era, communication has expanded beyond traditional print-based forms, as individuals increasingly engage with new media that demand critical evaluation, collaboration, and multimodal meaning-making. As a person, one of the new media in everyday life that we use are messaging applications such as Messenger, Instagram and other social media where we can communicate with our colleagues and friends via group chat . This practice helps us with our academic task particularly on managing time, maintaining social relationships, and sharing information instantly. Unlike in traditional, in just one click in our group chat you are able to share the important information that needs to be shared such as peer assigned tasks without leaving your house and meet physically with. Instead, you just need to have a video call either on Messenger or Google meet and it’s unlimited as long as you have an internet connection. A recent study showed that MIM or Mobile Instant Messaging has surpassed voice calls, emails, face-to-face communication, and social network sites (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) and become the most popular means of daily communication (Pew Research Center, 2019 ). Moreover, it is characterized by several communicative features such as multimodal where it has a combining text, emojis, and other visuals. One of several communicative features of these applications is interactivity and participation that embraces easy access communication by being able to comment, like, share and remix as an audience. The interactive nature of these platforms also shows literacy as a social practice, where collaboration and participation is necessary, especially in academic tasks. Hence, teachers should integrate similar digital tools in order for them to support collaborative learning while making a boundary or limitations to interact as student and teacher whereas teaching the students to communicate responsibly with the message etiquettes. When it comes to literacy pedagogy, the use of messaging applications appears that literacy today is more likely to expand beyond traditional reading and writing. It signifies that communication through group chats is multimodal, which suggests that educators should recognize and value the learners’ ability through communicating effectively using various modes that are much easier to understand by the help of multimedia elements rather than focusing on traditional or formal written language.

References

Juan J Merelo, Pedro A Castillo et. al 2023. Chatbots and messaging platforms in the classroom: An analysis from the teacher’s perspective

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10206593/

Ying Tang & Khe Foon Hew , 2022. Effects of using mobile instant messaging on student behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement: a quasi-experimental study

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8747857/

Pingping Huang & Qianyun Yu, 2022. Online Interactions: Mobile Text-Chat as an Educational Pedagogic Tool

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9774761/

Ying Cai, Zilong Pan, et. al . 2022. The Impact of Multimodal Communication on Learners’ Experience in a Synchronous Online Environment: A Mixed-Methods Study

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1374819.pdf

Setting Boundaries for Teacher- Student Online Communication

https://k12teacherstaffdevelopment.com/tlb/setting-boundaries-for-teacher-student-online-communication/

Bridget McCrea, 2012 The Intersection of Digital Literacy and Social Media

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2012/08/21/the-intersection-of-digital-literacy-and-social-media.aspx

From Clicks to Collaboration: Messaging Applications and Digital Literacy Pedagogy