New Literacies

Marc Prensky has talked about some of the new (or newly important) literacies that have developed due to the Internet; for example, understanding and evaluating website or blog authenticity, media literacy, and email literacy. Multimedia such as powerpoint and digital video require understanding how to create and transmit a message. While this is obvious on the surface, there are subtle strategies and elements of this new literacy which may deserve attention. One of the assignments for my class this semester was to subscribe to a list-serv. Most of my students subscribed to the h-net ed-tech list which I mentioned below. Since there are usually a dozen messages each day, I showed the class how to subscribe in digest mode, and have asked them to skim the daily digest. We've discussed this in class and one student explained how it is difficult to be able to scan the whole message (many screens of text) and find the parts you want to read. Other students have also mentioned how they prefer to print electronic sources that need to be read. All this made me realize that one of these new literacies is the ability to read on-screen text with the same ease as hard copy, and I began thinking about which strategies I use. For example, when I read the daily list-serv digest I look at the table of contents to decide what I want to look at. Then I scroll the message pretty fast, only pausing at each message header. So if you can easily identify a message heading that is a good skill that enables this literacy. By looking at the subject line of the header you know where you are in the digest message. Another strategy I use with news or magazine websites that have articles on multiple screens is that when they offer a version for printing, that version is usually easier to read on screen because it has fewer ads and is usually all one long screen, as opposed to having to click to advance to the next screen of a multi-screen news story.