I'm trying to keep up with homework while on vacation, so I tell my wife, "Honey, I'm going to go down to the lobby to put some thoughts on paper."
Yet, this proverbial paper is my blog in cyberspace that I've logged into while sitting in the business center of a hotel in Colorado Springs, Colorado. So, how complicated can literacy be - well, actually quite complicated.
In their article, Blinded by the Letter, Wysocki and Johnson-Eilolo note that Dianne Konawati's found almost 200 different instances of literacy mentioned in the ERIC Database (717). I would have to imagine that many of those literacies were based around understanding a certain technology - computer literacy being only one example.
In his article, Literacy, Technology, and Monopoly Capital, Richard Ohmann asks us to consider technology as, "itself a social process, saturated with the power relations around it, continually reshaped according to so some people's intentions" (706).
Literacy might just be considered participating in technology by becoming involved in the development of technology and learning new tools and processes to further technology for our own "intentions."
Many people forget to look at written language as a technology because it has been around for so long. But from the industrial revolution forward, that technology has been used to communicate other technological advancements. So, it can be seen as a scaffolding of technology.
yes, literacy as participation. that seems so useful a way to think about it... no matter what you're talking about being literate in, there's a degree of involvement and contribution that underlie the whole concept. the process. I also like that literacy is becoming more and more ongoing. (or maybe it always was ongoing, but now it's just faster?) we can't just check off the 'literate' checkbox on our list of life accomplishments. literacy needs to be maintained, too. hmmm.
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