Digital Literacies: Reading Signs Along The Way

Even though nearly every­one acknowl­edges some level of generic dig­i­tal lit­er­acy is now fun­da­men­tal to the per­for­mance in the work­place, it is extra­or­di­nar­ily dif­fi­cult to talk about what that might entail. Lit­er­acy is a com­plex notion. For exam­ple, there are dif­fer­ent kinds of lit­era­cies required for dif­fer­ent job descrip­tions. There are vary­ing lev­els of flu­ency that span from sim­ple aware­ness to, say, abid­ing by eth­i­cal stan­dards for par­tic­i­pa­tion. And there are mul­ti­ple lit­era­cies. That is, lit­er­acy is evolv­ing from a uni­tary con­cept to one seen as a range of inter­con­nected skills and prac­tices. So we have visual lit­er­acy, media lit­er­acy, crit­i­cal lit­er­acy, numer­i­cal lit­er­acy and musi­cal lit­er­acy among many oth­ers. Regret­tably, these dis­tinc­tions are eas­ily con­fused, the skills unevenly dis­trib­uted in the work­place, and some receive more pres­tige at the expense of oth­ers. There is almost always a strug­gle over what counts as literacy.

In fact it was the tra­di­tional lit­er­acy asso­ci­ated with text that made me real­ize this is more than just word play. In 2007 the Cana­dian Coun­cil on Learn­ing released a report that revealed the frag­ile state of lit­er­acy in Canada. Aston­ish­ingly (to me), almost half (48%) of adults over the age 16 expe­ri­ence some degree of dif­fi­culty in their abil­ity to read, write and under­stand effec­tively in Eng­lish and/or French.* Despite var­i­ous ini­tia­tives, this fig­ure has not changed over the last decade and is pre­dicted to remain unchanged through 2031. As Paul Cap­pon sadly noted:

Mil­lions of our fel­low cit­i­zens may learn to read but they can­not read to learn.

Much of the writ­ing about the new dig­i­tal lit­era­cies seems to imply that com­mu­ni­cat­ing through new media will some­how sub­sume read­ing and writ­ing. But it’s hard to believe. The tech­nol­ogy lit­er­ate worker must also be infor­ma­tion lit­er­ate, and vice versa, since dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies are in a way chang­ing what counts as knowl­edge. In this con­text, two other find­ings of the report are par­tic­u­larly sad signs of what is to come: Most adults with low lit­er­acy skills feel that their skills are ade­quate for their work. Many have neg­a­tive atti­tudes towards computers.

Unfor­tu­nately, none of the afore­men­tioned com­plex notions of dig­i­tal lit­er­acy seem to pro­vide an infra­struc­ture for par­tic­i­pants who resist mean­ing­ful par­tic­i­pa­tion. On the other hand, par­tic­i­pa­tory cul­ture prac­tices, such as fan fic­tion, seem to offer incen­tives for acquir­ing tra­di­tional lit­er­acy skills, and other prac­tices, such as those around gam­ing or YouTube, seem to pro­vide an infra­struc­tures that sup­ports learn­ing the skill to par­tic­i­pate in the culture.

How­ever, most work­places bar what is most valu­able about these par­tic­i­pa­tory cul­tures. For var­i­ous rea­sons, they limit or ban access to social soft­ware, blog­ging tools, YouTube, and other par­tic­i­pa­tory tools and plat­forms. This is one of the issues I hope to explore in future posts in this series. On the other hand, I think it is fair to say that most orga­ni­za­tions in fact embrace dig­i­tal lit­era­cies, but only the extent that it con­tributes to their bot­tom line. Fur­ther­more, they aren’t alone in adopt­ing a rel­a­tively nar­row, instru­men­tal per­spec­tive. Gov­ern­ments release gen­eral state­ments about global com­pet­i­tive­ness or active cit­i­zen­ship, but rarely back this up with any con­crete pol­icy objec­tives; edu­ca­tional providers con­cern them­selves only with the skills that stu­dents need in for­mal edu­ca­tion sys­tems. It is noto­ri­ously dif­fi­cult, of course, to unite such diverse stake­hold­ers with an inte­grated approach.

Researchers are just begin­ning to iden­tify the emerg­ing dig­i­tal lit­era­cies. We have only a broad sense of which ones mat­ter to adults in the work­place. This will also be the topic of future posts in this series.

*Low lit­er­acy refers to lit­er­acy skills below Level 3. Accord­ing to the OECD, Level 3 is the inter­na­tion­ally accepted level of lit­er­acy required to cope in a mod­ern society.

This post is part of Work­ing / Learn­ing blog car­ni­val, March 2009 edi­tion. This month’s host is Dave Fer­gu­son of Dave’s White­board.