First (you knew I’d say it) I don’t believe in Digital Literacy, or the term “literacies”.
I’m an OED girl, and it’s pretty clear that the word derived from competency with letters. In fact, the terms “illiterate” was used in the 16th century, long before anyone used the word “literate”, in the 19th. This suits my idea of historical flow for sure.
I am willing to accept the part of the definition that indicates it can be extended to mean “learned”, but it meant that in a time when learning meant formal learning, and formal learning meant letters.
In trying to determine what people mean by Digital Literacy, however, I looked at:
- National Council of Teachers of English: A Definition of 21st Century Literacies
- Douglas Rushkoff’s Why Johnny Can’t Program: A New Medium Requires a New Literacy
- Elizabeth Daley: Expanding the Concept of Literacy (EDUCAUSE Forum for Higher Education 2002)
What was interesting to me was not just the focus on proficiency with computer media (which I might see as the logical expansion of the word “literacy” as proficiency with letters), but also the critical thinking focus and moral direction being implied.
Rushkopf is downright apocalyptic in his insistence that we either learn programming or computers will be running us (cue sci-fi whistling spooky music). But programming is not a literacy by any definition – it’s a skill. The premise of his argument is sound: people (he says “kids” or “digital natives” but it’s really everybody) do not understand what the programs they are using actually do, or why they exist. His example is Facebook, which people don’t realize is mining them for advertising data. He also bemoans the lack of programmers being trained in our country as compared to Russia, China and Iran. I am not sure what he expects in a country that insists that everyone has a right to an academic university education, but that’s another post…
He’s saying that we can’t understand what the tools are doing to us without being able to program the tools themselves. I disagree. As I’ve said before, I don’t need to live in the 12th century to do know its impact. And I can know that Facebook is mining me (or that Google tracks my internet use, or that nothing I put on the web is private) without being a programmer. I can, as he says, “recognize the biases” of the technologies I use without creating them — I do it all the time.
On the utopian side is the NCTE. Nothing here about programming, except that they think we must be able to “create” multi-media “texts” (I know few people who can do this, and again, I don’t think they should have to if they understand how they’re created). I support up to a point their objective to “develop proficiency with the tools of technology” (to me that could also mean a book or paper and pencil). But further on we see the confusion between the term literacy (originally about the interpretation of symbols into cogent speech) and critical thinking, in the insistence that being able to critique is part of literacy. Perhaps it should be when dealing with print too, but to do that we must extend our idea of print literacy.
What the heck, we can do that. Let’s extend the term “literacy” to include critical assessment of what we read, and even what we experience. But then we get the moral, utopian dream in the NCTE’s definition: that building relationships, working globally, designing and sharing information are literacies. Worthy goals, yes, but not literacies. The implication is that society isn’t literate enough to work on such laudable goals with print media, although we have been doing just that for centuries. The NCTE’s definition constitutes a digital agenda. That’s fine, but let’s not call it a “definition” of “21st century literacies”.
Elizabeth Daley doesn’t like the way print continues to dominate our concept of literacy, and argues for expanding it into the visual medium. But certainly this isn’t new – her arguments could relate to Gothic paintings (“capable of constructing complex meanings independent of text”) or television (“methods of publication and teaching that are essentially different from those of text”). She claims there are a number of skills, most taught in her field of cinema studies, that are needed to be able to “read or write the language of media”, including editing, sound-image relationships, and typography. We are now getting awfully detailed and far away from the idea of a literacy that might be obtainable by ordinary folk.
Let’s say for a minute we buy the whole Literacy Package. We must all be programmers, create media in many formats (after studying technique and meaning, of course), develop proficiency in today’s technology, critically analyze all forms of media, and work collaboratively and globally. This will make it possible for people to understand the intellectual production of humanity through its visuals, and the electronic productions of the last century. It will also provide skills for such production in this century.
But go back before this century, or apart from historical images, and the fact is this: most information, disclosure, conceptual relationships, and techniques are textual. We have over 500 years of humanity’s knowledge represented in text, and a great need to understand it. People still believe what they read (even when it’s wrong), and write more poorly every year. It’s hardly the case that we have mastered print literacy, so we must be ready to move on to other media.
My conclusion is that understanding media (apologies to Marshall McLuhan), and even understanding its motives and effects, is a very desirable goal. But calling it “literacy” seems to open the door to fuzzy thinking. Words are still terribly important, even if you believe text is no longer king. And we should assess them critically as we move into the post-text world.
Guess I’ll go look up “contrarian” in the OED….
Hi Lisa,
I like the critique you’ve given the subject, I’m afraid I’m a fan of neither of the accounts, but especially not the dystopian ruskoff future. As an alternative to these ideas of literacy it might be worth looking at post or even watch him present at
Thank you, Lawrie. I was not aware of Dave White, and will take a look (and view).
Strange – just writing something about this when saw tweet from Frances Bell to your post. I like the term digital literacies (in the plural) because I think are fundamental changes going on in way we communicate, learn and share knowledge. Here are my favourite definitions:
Gillen and Barton (2010) offer a definition of digital literacies as “the constantly changing practices through which people make traceable meanings using digital technologies” (p.9).
Rather than explaining digital literacies in terms of competency and skill, Beetham, McGill and Littlejohn (2009) define digital literacy as:
* a foundational knowledge or capability, such as reading, writing or numeracy, on which more specific skills depend cultural entitlement – a practice without which a learner is impoverished in relation to culturally valued knowledge communication – expressing how an individual relates to culturally significant communications in a variety of media
* the need for practice – acquired through continued development and refinement in different contexts, rather than once-and-for-all mastery
* a socially and culturally situated practice – often highly dependent on the context in which it is carried out self-transformation – literacies (and their lack) have a lifelong, life wide impact. (p.9)
Graham, isn’t that the definition of education itself?
I agree with you. Understanding electronic media, and being able to use it is important in today’s society. Especially if you plan to have a professional career. But, if you can’t read and write print media, you won’t be able to effectively use electronic media to communicate. Reading and writing is literacy, and it’s the foundation that everything else is built on.
I’ve been thinking about this all day. It is indeed true that print literacy could be seen to include not only the interpretation of symbolic text, but writing. Then writing “media” could be seen as an aspect of media “literacy”.
I have to think on the implications of this. I can analyze a photograph without taking one, but not without knowing how one is taken. But perhaps visual media aren’t helpful here. The only thing I can think of corresponding to text would be speech. There are people who understand a language when it’s spoken but cannot speak it themselves. Are they then not literate in that language?
I wonder about the false binary here between “print” and “electronic.” I wrote about it a little while back, and offer those words here:
http://budtheteacher.com/blog/2009/11/24/whats-print/
I do think there’s some merit to thinking about the extension of words, letters, and the building blocks of language into new spaces, and I struggle myself with whether or not this is a “new” literacy, or just a refocusing on the “old.”
Excellent post here, and much food for thinking. Thank you.
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Lisa, this is a really interesting post. I think you make a strong argument that cautions against letting “literacy” become a noun that is paired with any number of subjects — financial literacy, environmental literacy, media literacy — at the expense of its original meaning. But I do wonder how, as our world moves away from being focused solely on “letters” to a variety of visual, digital, literary “marks.”
If literacy is about understanding language and about knowing the tools to read and write logical, meaningful things with language, I think I do see programming as a form of literacy. As a sidenote, as someone who works in the tech industry but has no formal tech training (I am a folklorist by training. Ha), I have often chaffed at the notion that we’re all supposed to learn to code. But I do understand Rushkoff’s argument. We should have a rudimentary understanding of how programming (computers) work. We won’t all be Shakespeares or Zuckerbergs (thank god), but I still think that it’s crucial we have a sense of the building blocks of programming language. And we need to do a much, much better job not just teaching kids how to use computers, but teaching kids to code.
Anyway, great post.
Would I ever like to be a little fly on the wall in the educational seminars you hang in! I couldn’t agree more; I’ve always hated terms such as “digital literacy” and “computer literacy”. Hmm…even the term “visual literacy” to me implies that eventually we need to turn our response to what we see into words.
Lisa,
I’ve found “recently” written critical analyses of technology very useful for deconstructing these kinds of themes. And I see these analyses as intellectually necessary, just as Das Kapital explains capitalism from outside itself.
A couple observations I’ve made, and have been thinking about regarding educational technology are first, the function of technology hype, second the degree to which rhetoric becomes dogma (.e.g Netgenness) and third the lack of historical perspective particularly regarding education in the United States.
technology hype reading
The Cult of Information, You Are Not a Gadget,
A Critique of Technocentrism in Thinking About the School of the Future
by Seymour Papert http://www.papert.org/articles/ACritiqueofTechnocentrism.html
Larry Cuban’s blog
Critical theory of education w/ historical perspective
Valencia’s Deficit Thinking, Spring’s Deculturalization and the Struggle for Equality.
http://www.netgenskeptic.com/
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I utterly support the idea that one of the things we should be promoting is understanding media (with no apologies to McLuhan – he was writing for the electronic media age, after all, just not quite yet the digital technologies as we know and love them today). And prior to that is literacy as being able to make sense of text.
At this year’s meeting of our college president, Bill Durden, made what I thought was a pretty persuasive argument for the liberal arts being an ideal foundation for navigating the ever-changing world of digital media. What he meant, I think, included critical reasoning skills of the kind NCTE discuss and, more generally, an education broad enough to prepare students to adapt to new developments, to master new tools both by analyzing them and practicing with them.
So, as you said to Graham here, we may be simply discussing education. After all, you’re pretty savvy when it comes to digital media, and I’m reasonably certain you didn’t take digital literacy classes in high school. What enables you to make sense of it all is curiosity allied to the habits of mind that allow you to analyse the world – the skills of decoding and sense-making that are at the core of the humanities and sciences.
The missing word above is CLAC (http://www.liberalarts.org/) – I messed up the html – need more digital literacies training.
Very well said. I wonder about that word “allied”. To what extent can such skills be taught? Did we just pick up digitial literacy by playing, or because we have those habits of mind? Did we always have those habits of mind, or were we taught them?
A few things, I think, without knowing. One – curiosity needs to be encouraged, nurtured, affirmed, and channeled by kindly adults into more systematic enquiry. Two – modeling that kind of practice is a powerful way to encourage it. If we grow up around people who follow where their curiosity leads and demonstrate sense-making behavior, we will most likely reproduce that as we grow.
On the other hand, maybe all those spelling tests and such are really the key.
I agree with both of these, and they’ve always been very important to me in terms of what it means to be a thinking person, literacies aside. But these are external affirmation and encouragement rather than active teaching. Or are they what teaching is supposed to be? What about students who exhibit little curiosity?
There’s only so much one can do for the temperamentally incurious. I guess the pedagogy of fun may have a role there. Except incurious people are less fun, also, on the whole. It may be that one has to startle them. Amaze them. Shock and awe.