it’s now standard practice, for example, to require students in a first-year-composition class to know how to use a word processor and to learn how to make good use of a database: those are not considered “computing skills” anymore. They’re just skills.

we’ve long assumed that students become better writers by reading a great deal; and we assume that experience at writing makes them better readers. For many generations, these 2 sides of the textual coin have been taught hand-in-hand: we don’t teach students to be consumers of words and then maybe later teach them (or teach only some of them, depending on their major or their future career) how to create words. Instead, they learn those skills simultaneously.

Students who become fluent in reading, do so because they read, not because they were taught the basic reading skills.  Of course, it wouldn’t have happened without having been taught the basic reading skills.  But they become fluent because they are required to read for the rest of their formal education and beyond.

If we expect students to become fluent in the broader and equally critical information and technology skills of being literate in a networked, digital, and abundant (contemporary) information environment, then they should be required to use those skills in all of their formal education, just like reading.  Reading, for education, is a learning literacy.  Reading, processing, and expressing knowledge in a networked, digital, and abundant information landscape are equally important learning skills — learning literacies.