Reviewing the term “literacy” was an interesting study because I only knew it, as Colin Lankshear expressed, as a word that “came to apply to an ever increasing variety of practices” (2011, p. 12). I had no concept of the term’s history and evolution into becoming such a commonly used word to define a person’s proficiency or mastery of a practice. Nevertheless, Lankshear points out the criteria for literacy is deeper than proficiency, or mastery, or experience, et cetera-et cetera.
Early on, literacy was a term used to identify whether a person could read or write, and read or write well enough to perform proficiently enough in their daily work. While minoring in Economics as an undergrad, I learned that one of the criteria of a growing or high-performing nation was its literacy (the strongest performing countries having high rates among women). Lankshear notes that literacy is associated with “a country’s ‘readiness’ for ‘economic take-off’”(2011, p. 7). If you peruse through the
CIA World Factbook (which I commonly used to analyze economic statistics and indicators), you can view country’s literacy rates – which the Worldbook defines as appropriate for people ages 15 and above who can read and write.
What was eye-opening to me, was the deeper notion of literacy explained in the “three dimensional model.” Beyond the operational dimension (the read/write proficiency of literacy), the meaning-making aspects of the cultrual dimension, and the value-defining elements of the critical dimension were new concepts to me, and made me wonder how these standards would apply to war traumatized countries like
Afghanistan,
Iraq, or
Syria. What kind of literacy do these nations have under the three dimensional model? At what rate are people able to, as Lankshear wrote, “speak up, to negotiate and to be able to engage critically with the conditions of their working lives” (2011, p. 19).
Aside from the larger, global view of literacy, I wondered about my own literacties when Lankshear wrote about the multiplicity of literacy and how literacy now means “to ‘be on the inside’ of a form or field of knowledge” (2011, p. 21) and “being able to ‘speak’ its language” (2011, p. 21). In my own experience, as with many people, I’ve had to adjust to new literacties when changing jobs, or changing industries; even getting into new hobbies, such as sports, or music, come with their own literacies. Yet, when Lankshear wrote about digital literacies, I thought about
my experience joining Twitter as an assignment in my Social Media and Digital Cultures course in the Spring 2014 semester. More broadly, I’ve adjusted to the many digital literacties since enrolling the University of Colorado Denver Learning Technologies Master’s program. I remember when joining the program I was more concerned about learning the ideas and concepts ` instructional design, or as Lankshear wrote “a critical, action-oriented ‘academic approach,’” (2011, p. 23) rather than learning how to build a e-learning module with Dreamweaver (the “skills based vocational approach” (Lankshear, 2011, p. 23)) as I thought these concepts would be more beneficial long-term because technology changes so rapidly, and I feared a more vocational education may become quickly irrelevant.
Lastly, there are two other concepts I felt were important to understanding digital literacy, or “new literacies.” As a proponent of
Connectivism, I enjoy Lankshear’s idea of the ethos of the internet, and that new literacies are “more ‘participatory,’ more ‘collaborative,’ and more ‘distributed’” (2011, p. 29). However, when sharing or collaborating, people should also have what Howard Rheingold called “crap detection” (Lankshear p. 25.). Crap detection, or more eloquently called “critical consumption” is an ability to know what is “worth attending to in terms of quality, relevance, and the like” (Lankshear, 2011 p. 25). This notion of deeming what is relevant is also present in Connectivism: what is correct now, may be incorrect tomorrow because of shifting realities, and learners must comprehend these shifts when analyzing incoming information.
Chapter 1 of Lankshear’s New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Social Learning provides cultural context, definition, and critical analysis to the term “new literacies” before we dive further into the subject matter, which is a nice meta cognitive practice of providing literacy. Now I could say I am more "new literacies literate."
CitationsLankshear, C. (2011). New Literacies: Concepts and Theories. In New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Social Learning (3rd ed., p. 7, 12, 19, 21, 23, 25, 29). New York, New York: Open University Press.