Defining Literacy

"I would define literacy as the ability to interact with the world using written language. I think literacy implies a level of proficiency where nothing in this medium is closed to you, even if you need a dictionary."

Was my response in our first discussion board. After briefly viewing the course materials for this week, I can see that I left out the obvious: technology. I think my definition was decent, but literacy today must mean something a little different, a little deeper, than it did before the age of the Internet. To be proficient with written language today means you can use it to interact with the digital word, not just the word on paper. With overwhelming amounts of information available, people need literacy skills that involve processing and sorting this information. Reading and writing (or typing) aren't obsolete just yet, but the Internet offers new avenues to information and communication, and new literacies will be required to travel these avenues. Don J, Leu, director of the New Literacies Research Lab at the University of Connecticut, defines new literacies as, "The skills, the strategies, the social practices, the dispositions that are required to use online information efficiently to learn."