Hi Elaine-- What a great question--how do we know? I'm not sure what research has been done on issues of context: how it plays a part in education (at all levels), how it can play a part, whether that education works, how it might increase our ability to develop global understanding, and on and on. Does anyone know of research specifically regarding context and education? P Pamela Estes Brewer Assistant Professor Department of English Appalachian State University phone 828-262-2351 fax 828-262-2133 email brewerpe@appstate.edu Elaine Studnicki wrote:
P,
I do know many literate adults who couldn't make there way out of a technology brown paper bag but they are considered literate. In education we try to make connections with real world experiences to put the learning into a context and hopefully students will know how to use and associate technology to other experiences. But honestly I don't know how often that happens and how effective it is. How do we know?
Thanks,
Elaine
On 4/15/09 3:50 PM, "Pam Brewer" <brewerpe@appstate.edu> wrote:
Jeremy--
On the one hand, you point to "digital literacy" as somewhat extraneous
"Digital literacy to me is just 'literacy'.... if you have the right skills to be 'literate' you should have the right skills to be digitally literate, but the argument is frequently made that it isn't so, thus we have digital literacy, we also have informational literacy, which is a different thing also apparently, there is internet literacy, and webbed literacies and multimodal media literacies."
On the other hand, you point out the importance of context. I think digital literacy is just one way to contextualize literacy, and maybe the ability to contextualize is central to this discussion because that ability contributes to both literacy and learning. It might also be a key issue to K-12 improvements. Context is certainly exigent to my field of technical communication and to my teaching though I hadn't thought about in quite this way before.
P
Pamela Estes Brewer
Assistant Professor Department of English Appalachian State University phone 828-262-2351 fax 828-262-2133 email brewerpe@appstate.edu
jeremy hunsinger wrote:
hoover dam... good proofreader.... yes, that's not me. On Apr 15, 2009, at 3:15 PM, jeremy hunsinger wrote:
True, but there in a 747 we are talking about something a bit more like a complex system of technologies, much like say the hoover damn than the the canonical aristotelian example which is similar though.... it is captaining a ship, which is a complex system, and takes years of mentorship, which is why i later talked about this in terms of that apprenticeship model of knowledge acquisition.
but in the end i was talking about the skills necessary to achieve literacy more than the literacy in this post and the practicing/development of those skills will likely be performed in a social context as an individual....
probably should also state that i generally mean a bit more than objects when i refer to technology, i tend to mean more than the echnics as the technology, so technology includes is all the social, cultural, ideological, systems that exist within the ecological arena that situates the technology in its performative and other contexts. that is closer i think to the 'techne' 'logos' meaning of technology than perhaps the more modern object without context.
anyway, i'm still supposed to be writing about knowledge and commodity forms in the information society and am still avoiding it.
On Apr 15, 2009, at 3:00 PM, Scott Swigart wrote:
" what we need for the future, we need people who have the skills
to achieve literacy on their own on any given new technology or old technology they are confronted with"
Not all technology is created equal. This assumes that the technology is designed to be usable, discoverable, and intuitive. Some of the most academically challenged people figured out how to use their iPhones just fine. The designers of the 747, on the other hand, had no requirement that pilots simply be able to figure it out on their own. d
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