Note to Self:
Aaron Eyler is right. Education is addicted to using literacy for everything that is not literacy. Even when it's used, it often doesn't encompass anything that one would use in true literacy. Is a child technological literate if he can write a blog? Not so much. He doesn't know about the character development of blogging and how it's changing us as people. He doesn't think about the setting of digital interaction. He hasn't thought about the themes of blogging and the larger conflict of man vs. machine. It's a misnomer we would never use in other contexts. Who would ever use attention math? It's trite and annoying. Last year, I heard about empathetic literacy, citizenship literacy, global literacy, awareness literacy, 21st century literacy, digital literacy and technological literacy (how that's different from digital literacy, I'm not sure). Why don't we try focusing on how to make students literacy literate instead?
Sincerely:
John
You can add to the list "ecological literacy." Just took a walk with a friend who is a college lit prof and her new course is called "Ecological Literacy". There is even a textbook! A compilation of non-fiction essays and excerpts about ecology and fiction that somehow is ecologically themed!
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