Please welcome Briten Russdal-Hamre. She is a visiting scholar from Norway who will be here until December and is located in office 734.
Please drop in and say hello. Briten is an Assistant Professor at University of Stavanger, Norway, where she teaches Norwegian, mainly grammar, reading and writing, in Teachers Education. She is specially interested in how teachers could facilitate reading digital, multimodal texts, such as games, wikis, and social medias, for their students, and how to use such texts as inspiration for text production. There are two main reasons for this interest: 1) More than 90 % of Norwegian children between the age of 9 and 18 years play digital games and most of them also have an account in one or more social medias. Bringing these texts into the classroom will benefit from the students out-of-school skills, and there is a possibility that e.g., gamers would be intrigued to know their skills to be, not only accepted, but also appreciated, inside the borders of the Norwegian subject. 2) Every day we are overwhelmed by digital texts, and everybody need to learn how to navigate and interpret this excessive information market by noticing how different modalities add to the meaning of the text. In other words, we must explore how to increase the critical literacy skills among the students.