Changes in Literacy

What Counts as Literacy?

Literacy used to be seen as simply being able to read and write. Being able to comprehend what you had read and being able to engage with others about what you had read was the standard of being literate. The media in which our form of communication has transitioned from pen and paper, otherwise known as hardcopy, to online media such as blogs like you are reading now, newsgroups, chat rooms, online journals, and other publications. As new medias become social norm so does the necessity for new literacy.

How literacy changes in response to the new media landscape

The use of technology in industry has become an accepted use of practice and therefore today's students need to learn to become literate in computers, online reading, and technology itself. They need to obtain these skills, such as credibility of online material, how to perform searches, and how to practice safety on the Internet.

What value should be applied to the new forms of communication that emerge?

It is my opinion that we should apply full value to the efforts of transitioning to considering a new way of communication or media to a technology that is only a current fad. There needs to be socialized standard use or common practice of using a certain technology for us to actually place a value to it. What do you all think?

Furthering My Learning - Texts and New Media

A look at the Quote…

Having been asked to respond to the following quote: "The distinctive contribution of the approach to literacy as social practice lies in the ways in which it involves careful and sensitive attention to what people do with texts, how they make sense of them and use them to further their own purposes in their own learning lives" (Gillen and Barton, 2010, p. 9). Throughout the readings of chapters 1, 5, and 10 in Literacies Social, Cultural and Historical Perspectives by Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel, it is discussed what Functional Literacy is and the social constraints of only being functional is. It is further discussed what "New Literacies" are. I will discuss what I do with different texts, how I process them, and how I use them to further my own learning.