New Literacies
Consistency of Change
The Future is Today
Access points for literacy are ever changing. In 1984, literacy was primarily defined as being able to read and write. However, Nicholas Negroponte saw the potential of the future. His ideas were well beyond his time: touch screens, laptops, electronic books, computer programming/app design, and video teleconferencing. See the TED video below to understand where we were in 1984 and how crazy the technologies that we use today seemed back then.
At 9:20 of this clip, Mr. Negroponte provides an example of how a young child was not able to read, and admitted that he could not read. However, he could read a computer manual and program computers. When pressed to respond to how he read the computer manual and was able to program computers, the child retorts that "it's not reading". Many teens and youths today are quite adept at reading Twitter and other Social Media sites, but are not proficient at reading textbooks or other academic literature.