Group items tagged

Educational technology is nudging literacy instruction beyond its oral and print-based tradition to embrace online and electronic texts as well as multimedia. Computers are creating new opportunities for writing and collaborating. The Internet is constructing global bridges for students to communicate, underscoring the need for rock-solid reading and writing skills. By changing the way that information is absorbed, processed, and used, technology is influencing how people read, write, listen, and communicate.

Information Literacy: The ability to access and use information, analyze content, work with ideas, synthesize thought, and communicate results. Digital Literacy: The ability to attain deeper understanding of content by using data-analysis tools and accelerated learning processes enabled by technology. New Literacy: The ability to solve genuine problems amidst a deluge of information and its transfer in the Digital Age. Computer Literacy: The ability to accurately and effectively use computer tools such as word processors, spreadsheets, databases, and presentation and graphic software. Computer-Technology Literacy: The ability to manipulate the hardware that is the understructure of technology systems. Critical Literacy: The ability to look at the meaning and purpose of written texts, visual applications, and spoken words to question the attitudes, values, and beliefs behind them. The goal is development of critical thinking to discern meaning from array of multimedia, visual imagery, and virtual environments, as well as written text. Media Literacy: The ability to communicate competently in all media forms—print and electronic—as well as access, understand, analyze and evaluate the images, words, and sounds that comprise contemporary culture

But surprise–the conventional wisdom is wrong. Our special report on books and the future of publishing is brim-full of reasons to be optimistic. People are reading more, not less. The Internet is fueling literacy. Giving books away online increases off-line readership. New forms of expression–wikis, networked books–are blossoming in a digital hothouse.

Although literacy learning on the Internet involves the basic processes of comprehending and writing text, it differs from print-based literacy in significant ways. Text, as defined in this book, includes sources of digital information in print or multimedia formats. Reading and writing text online is highly interactive. Writing becomes more fluent as students engage in online dialogues involving short writing–reading cycles. Online drafting and revising involve a social collaborative process between a writer and his or her immediate audience. Information research becomes a critical reading process useful for sorting through volumes of online texts to find and synthesize reliable data, rather than a memorization of the print encyclopedia. Reading through hypertexts or interactive multimedia is an active process in which the reader develops an internal narrator who synthesizes meaning and decides which link to follow next and why.

We found three primary areas in which the Internet provides curricular benefits. These were information research, writing and publishing, and participating in online learning communities. We (McNabb, Hassel, et al., 2002) also discovered prevalent instructional practices such as:   designing the Internet-based activities to help meet the diverse needs of students by engaging them through personal interests;   customizing the teaching–learning cycle in ways that motivate students to take more responsibility for their learning; and   fostering self-directed literacy learning habits among students, which researchers and teachers indicated are not only vital to, but also achievable through, Internet-based literacy learning.