Week 5 - Thoughts on Literacy and Technology

New technologies are changing literacy by expanding its contextual landscape. The article entitled "Toward a Theory of New Literacies Emerging from the Internet and Other Information and Communication Technologies" highlighted a few of the social and historical contextual events that ultimately shaped literate behavior. A few of the examples highlighted in the article to demonstrate the changing social and historical context of literacy are the ancient Sumerian development of written invoices to aid commerce, the spread of Christianity, and the social revolution in Czarist Russian. In the aforementioned examples the social and historical contextual landscape of literacy in a particular era changed but literacy in and of itself did not change.

The latter point holds true as it pertains to new technological innovations and literacy. With the advent of the information technology age and its many technological mediums particularly the Internet, only the contextual landscape in which literacy is fostered has changed. For example, in our class we have to be literate in a few technological mediums to effectively participate and contribute; word processing, email, search engines, and the Internet. Becoming literate in the aforementioned technological mediums involves learning new skills that impact our technological literacy. However, the essence of literacy hasn't changed because regardless of the context, literacy involves the ability to comprehend written, oral, and auditory information.