Leading Learning Conference :: Blog :: LL2007 - What is literacy in the 21st century?

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1. Hi Heather

   What a great question. I love David Warlick's take on things in his recent blog--so if I can 'borrow' from him here is a start--

    "There are two things that we do know that connect directly to our current vision of school.

   1. The nature of information has changed (digital, networked, overwhelming, unconstrained)
   2. We can not clearly describe the future we are preparing our children for.

   From these ideas, two demands rise.

   1. That we redefine literacy (one literacy) to reflect an increasingly digital, networked… information environment.
   2. That we teach our children to be life long learners.

   What I find interesting right now (and this is what’s great about being pushed by frustrating experiences), is that literacy and life long learning, might actually be combined to something that we might call learning literacy...

   The ability to expose/find truth, employ information, express ideas compellingly to real audiences, and to understand and practice the ethical use of information, are all skills necessary to learning in a dynamic information environment.  If, in our conversations about teaching and learning, we replace literacy with explicit discussions of learning literacy, then we might have a foothold for starting to scale that wall, and perhaps even visioning classrooms that can tunnel it."

   http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/ May 3, 2007

   Food for thought!!!

   Suzanne

    

   Suzanne Riverin on Friday, 04 May 2007, 23:02 EDT # |

2. Thank you for these useful elucidations and the reference, Suzanne. I couldn't agree more that we are educating for another century in current school practices and this is very scary. I think Harold Benjamin's spoof written in 1939 under the pseudonym of Abner J. Peddiwell on the Sabre tooth Curriculum is entirely apropos.

   Here are some further ideas about how literacy has changed from my talk (as promised). I would really value comments on this evolving list:

   Contemporary literacy involves:

   a page to screen shift

   image-centredness over print-centredness

   changing human-technology interfaces

   programmable multimodal textualities

   orthographic hybridity

   one to  many individualized accounts

   democratic, interactive publishing

   instantaneous and continuous social networking

   online and offline identities

    

   I invite your additions and comments...

   Heather 

   Heather Lotherington on Sunday, 13 May 2007, 13:27 EDT # |