[Air-L] Your Opinion

[Pam Brewer]

Jeremy--

On the one hand, you point to "digital literacy" as somewhat extraneous

"Digital literacy to me is just 'literacy'.... if you have the right 
skills to be 'literate' you should have the right skills to be digitally 
literate, but the argument is frequently made that it isn't so, thus we 
have digital literacy, we also have informational literacy, which is a 
different thing also apparently, there is internet literacy, and webbed 
literacies and multimodal media literacies."

On the other hand, you point out the importance of context.  I think 
digital literacy is just one way to contextualize literacy, and maybe 
the ability to contextualize is central to this discussion because that 
ability contributes to both literacy and learning.  It might also be a 
key issue to K-12 improvements.  Context is certainly exigent to my 
field of technical communication and to my teaching though I hadn't 
thought about in quite this way before. 

P

Pamela Estes Brewer

Assistant Professor
Department of English
Appalachian State University
phone 828-262-2351
fax  828-262-2133
email  brewerpe at appstate.edu



jeremy hunsinger wrote:
> hoover dam... good proofreader.... yes, that's not me.
> On Apr 15, 2009, at 3:15 PM, jeremy hunsinger wrote:
>
>> True, but there in a 747 we are talking about something a bit more 
>> like a complex system of technologies, much like say the hoover damn 
>> than the the canonical aristotelian example which is similar 
>> though.... it is captaining a ship, which is a complex system, and 
>> takes years of mentorship, which is why i later talked about this in 
>> terms of that apprenticeship model of knowledge acquisition.
>>
>> but in the end i was talking about the skills necessary to achieve 
>> literacy more than the literacy in this post and the 
>> practicing/development of those skills will likely be performed in a 
>> social context as an individual....
>>
>> probably should also state that i generally mean a bit more than 
>> objects when i refer to technology, i tend to mean more than the 
>> echnics as the technology, so technology includes is all the social, 
>> cultural, ideological, systems that exist within the ecological arena 
>> that situates the technology in its performative and other 
>> contexts.    that is closer i think to the 'techne' 'logos' meaning 
>> of technology than perhaps the more modern object without context.
>>
>> anyway, i'm still supposed to be writing about knowledge and 
>> commodity forms in the information society and am still avoiding it.
>>
>>
>> On Apr 15, 2009, at 3:00 PM, Scott Swigart wrote:
>>
>>> " what we need for the future, we need people who have the skills
>>>> to achieve literacy on their own on any given new technology or old
>>>> technology they are confronted with"
>>>
>>> Not all technology is created equal.  This assumes that the 
>>> technology is
>>> designed to be usable, discoverable, and intuitive.   Some of the most
>>> academically challenged people figured out how to use their iPhones 
>>> just
>>> fine.  The designers of the 747, on the other hand, had no 
>>> requirement that
>>> pilots simply be able to figure it out on their own.
>>> d
>>
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