Literacy Thinking

If a quick definition of literacy is the capacity to both understand and create what goes on a page, then to determine current literacy needs we must be able to compare what happens on paper pages with what happens in 21st century communication on Web pages. What are the major forms of composition routinely placed on the Internet/Web? How are these Web forms being combined and integrated with the historical precedents of 21st century literacy?

The Gutenberg graphic on the left represents pre-digital communication on a page, a foundational palette of text on paper, arranged into different sized frames, enhanced by images. This is sometimes reversed with the image as the primary object with an overlay of text, as with the opening pages of many National Geographic articles. Compositions from books to magazines to posters build on this knowledge. The 21st Century graphic on the right (with its clickable hot spots) begins with a foundational palette of Web text, which may allow readers to add input and/or edit on the same page as the original author, all within a richer variety frame designs. This recent change to easily support reader input on the Web is being called the read/write web or Web 2.0. Further, six additional forms of media are routinely mixed with each other and text on this Web palette. This mixing of compositional forms or modes becomes richer with each passing month. More significantly, any of these other forms of media can be the primary form of communication, the palette on which the other media forms are added and mixed in a supporting role.

The terms frame and sensor are less familiar and require some further explanation. On paper, frames are the shape of the printed page itself, as well as areas within the page, creating concepts such as a sidebar. To those same paper concepts, the web adds the capacity to mix different pages from different sources as different frames within the same web page, the equivalent of displaying and independently controlling the contents of two or more books, side-by-side, on the same page.

Sensor composition means to be able to find, or place and setup sensors to collect relevant data to solve a problem, reporting the data to remote devices that is later collected or sometimes automatically sent to a server on the Internet for instant retrieval and further compositional forms. Sensors are simple measuring devices of great variety. Examples range from sensors that measure the acidity of a stream to the temperature of rooms throughout a building. The hotspot clickable WaterWatch site of USGS can drill down to almost any stream in a United States valley. A WeatherBug or Lego Robotics system is a more personal example that teachers can place in their classroom or school for collecting real-world data. These are just some examples of systems that provide raw data. Some provide more, including historical data, graphs and maps of real-time ongoing events from an array of sensors. They provide a significant real-world source of data for science and mathematics literacy activities that guide science, policy and legal decisions that are in turn the grist of curriculum in language arts and social studies.

The Digital Divide

“The future is here; it’s just not widely distributed yet.” William Gibson

Public K-12 education has not been financed to have personal computers used as routinely as paper by every student in every classroom. Some elements of the computer industry have only very recently given their full attention to solving this finance problem with the design and manufacture of cheap computers, designs not yet available for purchase in adequate numbers for public education. Consequently, K-12 students must pick up the bulk of their knowledge on their own, which means at home. This in turn means that only those families with greater wealth and greater experience with information technology can become fully literate in 21st century communication. The large number of teenagers and pre-teenagers active on the Web is an indication that they are more than able to understand and exploit its features for their own purposes. This gap between the haves and have-nots is sometimes referred to as the digital divide. Those who have made it across the digital divide, like the most literate at any point in history, become the cadre of people capable of exercising entrepreneurial skills in inventing our future and on the faster track to new jobs in the newest fields being invented.

The 21st century challenge is to work the problem further. What are our educational plans and solutions for migrating all future generations of citizens to this next generation of literacy?

Comment on Literacy Thinking.

v1.4