Here are my slides from E-Learn 2019, in New Orleans. The presentation was about the nature of technologies and their roles in communities (groups, networks, sets, whatever), their highly situated nature, and their deep intertwingling with culture. In general it is an argument that literacies (as opposed to skills, knowledge, etc) might most productively and usefully be seen as the hard techniques needed to operate the technologies that are required for any given culture. As well as clarifying the term and using it in the same manner as the original term “literacy”, this implies there may be an indefinitely large range of literacies because we are all members of an indefinitely large number of overlapping cultures. All sorts of possibilities and issues emerge from this perspective.
Abstract: Dozens, if not hundreds, of literacies have been identified by academic researchers, from digital- to musical- to health- to network- literacy, as well as combinatorial terms like new-, multi-, 21st Century-, and media-literacy. Proponents seek ways to support the acquisition of such literacies but, if they are to be successful, we must first agree what we mean by ‘literacy’. Unfortunately, the term is used in many inconsistent and incompatible ways, from simple lists of skills to broad characteristics or tendencies that are either ubiquitous or meaninglessly vague. I argue that ‘literacy’ is most usefully thought of as the set of learned techniques needed to participate in the technologies of a given culture. Through use and application of a culture’s techniques, increasing literacy also leads to increasing knowledge of the associated facts and adoption of the values that come with that culture. Literacy is thus contextually situated, mutates over time as a culture and its technologies evolve, and participates in that co-evolution. As well as subsuming and eliminating much of the confusion caused by the proliferation of x-literacies, this opens the door to more accurately recognizing the literacies that we wish to use, promote and teach for any given individual or group.
