Week 3 of the Critical Literacies course bears the title Pragmatics which is described in Moodle as follows:
The capacity to use communicative elements in actions, or to take actions using communication, to express, commit, interrogate, and engage in interactions. Including being active participants in the world and on the Web versus passive consumers.
Having been away all week, I haven’t yet accessed any of the readings but list them below for my own future reference. However in this presentation by Stephen , I have interpreted what he says about pragmatics as a critical literacy as being the importance of understanding that the meaning of what you say is in the effect that you generate by saying it. Not sure if I have understood this correctly, but even if not, then this would have implications for networked communication. I will need to listen to the presentation again and come back to this.
What is Pragmatics – http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsPragmatics.htm
Pragmatics is the study of the aspects of meaning and language use that are dependent on the speaker, the addressee and other features of the context of utterance
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – Pragmatics deals with utterances, by which we will mean specific events, the intentional acts of speakers at times and places, typically involving language.
http://www.missiontolearn.com/2009/09/sharpen-critical-thinking-skills/ 10 best sites to sharpen critical thinking skills
http://www.masternewmedia.org/learning_educational_technologies/media-literacy/new-media-literacy-critical-thinking-Howard-Rheingold-20071019.htm Robin Good New Media Literacy In Education: Learning Media Use While Developing Critical Thinking Skills
http://www.studygs.net/genius.htm thinking like a genius: critical thinking -creative problem solving
Here a more general paper by Shor on ‘critical literacies‘ that I used in the discussion forum to show the evolving meanings of the term in the literature.