A few notes on literacy

This is a long post with information on 21st century literacies.

21st Century Literacy- framed by academic achievement

DIGITAL AGE LITERACY
 Basic, scientific, economic and technological literacies
 Visual and information literacies
 Multicultural literacy + awareness

INVENTIVE THINKING
 Adaptability, managing complexity, and self direction
 Curiosity, creativity and risk taking
 Higher order thinking and sound reasoning

EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION
 Teaming, collaboration, interpersonal skills
 Personal, social and civic responsibility
 Interactive communication
HIGH PRODUCTIVITY
 Prioritizing, planning and managing for results
 Effective use of real world tools
 Ability to produce relevant high quality products
EnGauge: 21st Century Literacy for 21st Century Learners. Literacy in the digital age, 2003 www.ncrel.org/engauge

- Cyclical nature of learning, relearning

- Generational expectation of active participation in and through ‘their’ media of choice (social networking, games, video, etc)

…workforce preparation is dependent on the ability of schools to promote student’s cognitive abilities such as logical thinking, problem solving, analysis, careful observation and data management. P. 9

“The research shows that all children – regardless of age, gender, socioeconomic status and economic status – can excel when immersed in such meaningful, challenging work.” P. 11.

Global Imperative: report of the 21st century literacy summit

Characteristics of the new literacy in context of the remixed culture of digital natives
1. Multi-modal
2. Includes creative fluency as well as interpretive facility
3. a new grammar with its own rules of construction
4. requires interactive communication
5. implies ability to use media to evoke responses
6. potential to transform the way we learn

Partnership for 21st Century Skills
Learning Skills
1. Information and Communication
2. Thinking and problem solving
a. Critical thinking
b. Problem solving
3. Interpersonal and self-directed

Are they really ready to work? Conference Board, et al
“Workforce readiness report card”
identifies current deficiencies in students coming out of K12 and college

21st century workforce need for applied skills in
Critical thinking and problem solving
Oral communications
Written communications
Teamwork/collaboration
Diversity
Information technology application
Leadership
Creativity/innovation
Lifelong learning/self direction
Professionalism/work ethic
Ethics/social responsibility

Recent (2006) assessment by this report indicates high school graduates are not prepared, and college students are mostly adequately prepared at best.

Jones-Kavalier, Barbara R. and Suzanne Flannigan. Connecting the digital dots: Literacy of the 21st century

Digital and visual literacies are the next wave of literacies
Current divergence in education between digital immigrant teachers and digital native kids
“Challenge in moving beyond the glitz and pizzazz of the flashy technology to teach true literacy in this new milieu.”
“Digital literacy represents a person’s ability to perform tasks effectively in a digital environment…” “…includes the ability to read and interpret media (text, sound, images), to reproduce data and images through digital manipulation, and to evaluate and apply new knowledge gained from digital environments.” “…the most critical of these is the ability to make educated judgments about what we find online.”

“Visual literacy … emerges from seeing and integrating sensory experiences. Focused on sorting and interpreting ... visible actions and symbols, a visually literate person can communicate information in a variety of forms and appreciate the masterworks of visual communication” “… have a sense of design – the imaginative ability to create, amend and reproduce images, digital or not, in a mutable way.” “Their imaginations seek to reshape the world in which we live, at times creating new realities.”

Implicit skills in visual and digitally literate are:
Information literacy
Lateral literacy
Reproduction literacy

“Literacy in any form advances a person’s ability to effectively and creatively use and communicate information.”

MPL mission: to link people in the city and beyond with the transforming power of knowledge.

Perkel, Dan. Copy and paste literacy …
Participation and remix as important concepts to understand the new media literacy.
Reuse and appropriate of media
Expressive power of creation in myspace pages
Bases his conception on Andrea diSessa:
‘The convergence of a large number of genres and social niches ona common representational form.”
Three theoretical influences
Literacy practices considered in their social context
Uses of representations take on specific patterns, or genres, that also must be taken into account (ie. the media used).
Media dependant properties, ie. genre of the representational forms matters

Further, for literacy practice to be powerful, it must be two-way, involving
both a reading and writing component. Literacy is both a social and a technical process

Research on literacy practices related to the web focus on development of critical skills in analyzing and evaluating web content, or the use of html

“If ‘participation’ is a socially oriented word that challenges the consumption/production dichotomy, then ‘remix’ may be its technical counterpart to bridge the reading/writing dichotomy.”

“After school programs key to preparing students for the 21st century, global economy”

“After school and summer programs are an important, but until now largely untapped, opportunity to help prepare young people for employment and citizenship in the global age.”

Global Kids as one exemplar organization

Leadership Literacy

Is about being experienced at reframing, creating new mental models and shifting the p lace from where thinking comes. It is more about the context of thinking than the content.

“Consciousness literacy allows leaders to visit other models, sample other contexts, and see other realities. As our model building skills are sharpened and our minds become open to possibilities beyond our present assumptions and attachments, we become more adept, life-long learners, eager to discover and grow.”

Quoting Alvin Toffler: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, un-learn and relearn.” Those who can un-learn and relearn are the leaders for tomorrow.”

Building student data literacy
“students need critical thinking skills so that they can ‘upload’ information…”

“…21st century literacy has moved beyond that into the realm of possessing the critical thinking skills necessary to delve into information or data and figure out what it really means.”

quoting Schield, information literacy requires statistical and data literacy