On Technological Literacy

Becoming Literate in the Information Age 
Cultural Ecologies and the Literacies of Technology

Those were the days

This is a fascinating study by Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe. Being 8 years older than Melissa, I'm in between her and her father. I'm a lot like one of the study participants, Dean Woodbeck (48 at the time of the study), dealing with mainframes, Fortran programming language, and punch cards. In my early 20's, I was discouraged with computers not just because of their complexity, but with the method of learning. I wrote routines to punch cards, handed them in and had to come back the next day to see if my program worked. Then debug and repeat. It was the same with writing Basic programming. To me, it may as well have been Chinese.

I believe that part of what we're experiencing in this prolonged recession has a lot to do with technological literacy - or the lack of it. Many of the jobs that have been lost are gone forever. Many of them were positions requiring little technological literacy and this unemployed workforce hasn't the skill-set for this new world - a world that today bears little resemblance to 1978.

Retraining for re-entry

Our culture is indeed undergoing a profound transition from that of a superpower with manufacturing might towards a post-modern world of global commerce and "rhizomatically organized digital information exchanges." The value placed on younger workers possessing these skills (and receiving jobs utilizing them) will be seen more and more in coming years. It doesn't bode well for older workers either unprepared or unwilling to "change their stripes" and go back to school for retraining and re-entry into a profoundly different workplace that values completely different skills. There are many back to school at MATC but this is only a fraction of those that should be. IT professionals seem to always have their pick of jobs, recession or not. Technological literacy has a lot to do with this.

I'm a little surprised that the researchers are still finding gender to play a part in technological literacy and am willing to bet that since this 2004 study, it's a lot less today. Use of computers, the internet and social networking tend to, in my opinion and with first-hand experience as a father, level the playing field between males and females. As with Brittany (p. 668), remarking that being a girl seldom hampers her pursuit of digital literacy, I'm convinced my daughter feels the same. She has more than 300 Facebook friends and it's fairly balanced between gender.

This reminds me of a recent article by Hanna Rosin I read in the July/August edition of The Atlantic titled, The End of Men. By almost every professional measure, women are outperforming men and are being placed into positions traditionally held my men, including those at the highest organizational levels. If there are gender-based barriers to technological literacy, they are few and getting fewer. 

The internet has really become a gateway to the literacies of technology as the authors allude to (p. 670). If computers in the home weren't connected to a network and were simply stand-alone workstations for homework, games, and say, home finance like Quickbooks, we wouldn't have the opportunity for email and collaboration and community that comes from social networking. Although Melissa and Brittany learned a lot on their own, principally via their own individual initiative, it's through networking that technological literacy flourishes and indeed has exploded. Kids emulate other kids and nobody wants to be out of the loop. In this case, social networking is much like conventional social groups at school where being "in" is being someone.

Multimodal learning...  we're getting there.

In drawing a comparison to last week's readings, we continue with these readings to cover inadequacies of schools to address and promote teaching paradigms that offer students alternatively a "visually rich and multimodal" (p. 671) way of learning and being taught. Like Charles, most of the analytical thinking often prized in schools is done out of school. But schools would have to have truly individualized instruction to address / encourage every student's individual interests and aptitudes. I don't know how this can be done. Yes, the print-based and alphabetic literacies taught have much to do with how the teachers were taught, but I'm not going to get into it again in lots of detail that students still must know the traditional basics of these literacies. Maybe in 25 years, this will change, but not right now, despite what kids might be doing in their spare time.

Indeed, these are fascinating first-hand personal accounts which tell us much about how technological literacy can be shaped, but as the authors contend (p. 676), they cannot be considered indicative or representative of any larger population. The inequities of access to technology by race has parallels to the same inequities with other things. Mortgages, living in particular neighborhoods, and job advancement come to mind. Computers, as ubiquitous as they are today, in some segments of society, still denote privilege and power. And computer literacy certainly gives those in the know power. As with Brittany, I see a difference with my students. Many come from lower class families with a lack of access to computers. Having been on a computer since age 4, my teenage daughter is further ahead in many ways.

There's a Brave New World coming. Anybody can see it. But it's coming more gradually and more in fits and starts than scholars sometimes might have patience for. As a college writing instructor, it's a challenge to think of teaching in visually rich, multimodal ways when many students are entering college with woefully inadequate grammatical skills and ability to structure thoughts to a sheet of paper. This lands right at my door and I have to get these kids ready to enter a workforce where employers still and will for quite some time, value traditional literacy along with technological.