I’ve been asked to reflect on some readings in educational philosophy and respond to this assessment, “The distinctive contribution of the approach to literacy as social practice lies in the ways in which it involves careful and sensitive attention to what people do with texts, how they make sense of them and use them to further their own purposes in their own learning lives.”

First, though, I want to give my immediate reaction on reading the quoted sentence itself. I object to the idea that one can, “.. approach … literacy as social practice …” No. Literacy is a capability present in individual humans. It is more complex than its general usage, clearly. It is not a binary “Yes, she is literate,” or “No, he is not literate.” But it has a perfectly valid defined meaning that shouldn’t be hijacked to mean something like “fluency in social interactions.” (It is perhaps difficult for someone whose background is in the hard sciences and computers to react fairly to a treatment like the above, which owes more to the humanities.) It can certainly be extended to incorporate more than “the decoding of written texts” and I can appreciate that usage at least as a metaphor. It does not refer to “social practice.”

The first reading is from New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Social Learning (Lankshear and Knobel, 2011). The very title, of course, says that I will disagree with the authors about at least one thing. Niggling about word-meanings aside, the authors have clearly both researched heavily and thought deeply about these matters.

In the first chapter of their book, Lankshear and Knobel review the history of “literacy” as a topic of (childhood) education. It’s a very left-politics-influenced viewpoint, blaming the problems of the illiterate on a lack of class consciousness in a startlingly Marxist manner. They review the work of Paulo Freire, presenting as astonishing his integration of (textual) literacy into the rest of the curriculum. To this reader, it is jarring to read sentences like, “Within Freire’s approach to promoting literacy, then, the process of learning literally to read and write words was an integral part of learning to understand how the world operates socially and culturally in ways that produce unequal opportunities and outcomes for different groups of people.” That’s not about literacy at all.

There is also some implied criticism of non-Marxists, as in the description of “Literacy, economic growth, and social well-being” (pages 7 and 8), which refers dismissively to (essentially) non-socialist figures, notably by the use of scare quotes on page 8.

This introductory chapter ends up being primarily a summary of the history of how various people, organizations, and governments treated the concept of “Literacy” through the Twentieth Century. It consciously makes no effort to evaluate the validity of any proposition, presumably because this will be undertaken in later chapters. I might question why the authors chose not to mention that certain ideas are or were controversial (e.g. the Common Core), at the very least.

In Chapter 5, Lankshear and Knobel discuss “Blogs and Wikis.” As both a blogger myself and a longtime follower of blogs, I found the treatment to be both accurate and comprehensive, based on my own memories and readings. Of course, since I am reading the 2011 edition, it’s interesting to see some of the predictions be wrong, e.g. Technorati’s cited statement that ” … the lines between blogging, microblogging … and social networking are disappearing …” It turns out that Twitter, WordPress, and Facebook are still quite distinct, although admittedly Tumblr does emulate some functions of all 3.

Page 144, interestingly, argues that blogging is extremely flexible, presumably in comparison to other media or communication methods … but all their examples of its flexibility apply to the original meaning of literacy: reading and writing text in general. In the taxonomy that I am familiar with, blogs would be a subset of text–a very flexible one, certainly, but not quite as flexible as the superset, text itself. Again, I think my personal idiosyncrasies are showing: as a one-time biology teacher, I tend to think in hierarchical categories when classifying anything, by analogy to Kingdom-Phylum-Class.

I’m also trained, as a scientist, to distrust anecdotes. The authors spend many pages analyzing posts and comments on one particular blog and using them to illustrate what they believe to be general trends or tendencies in blogging. This of course is not presented as evidence (the authors are not in this chapter trying to prove anything) but it still reads as “off” to me.

The treatment of Wikis is again, initially both accurate and detailed. Since 2011, Wikipedia has become perhaps the best-known web site after Google, so their statement that, “… wikis remain less commonly subscribed to and are less familiar to readers at large than are blogs …” is humorous even as little as 5 years later, when blogs are still read only by a minority while everyone knows Wikipedia.

Lankshear and Knobel make use of the collaborative nature of wikis to examine the concept of “online community” in an enlightening and useful manner on page 162. I do see one key item missing (perhaps it will be in a later chapter?): the idea of “online subcultures.” Wikiculture is very different from, say, Metafilter’s forums or Chat Roulette. And I still fail to see why this is “literacy.”

Finally, the authors briefly examine collaborative creative tools, using Google Docs as an example. As an older computer user, I’m surprised they do not mention the clear pre-Internet predecessors of the collaboration features they extoll, such as Microsoft Word’s change-tracking and comments features.

We were also asked to read and comment on “Digital Literacies:  A Research Briefing by the Technology Enhanced Learning phase of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme” by Gillen and Barton (authors of the quote at the top).

The authors of this publication (not a paper, not a book, not a magazine article) approach the subject in a manner much more congenial to this reader, defining terms and not stretching “literacy” to include things like awareness of social injustice. In the introduction, they take great pains to begin with the original meaning of the word, and to show how and why it has been extended, without extending it to the breaking point.

Gunther Kress then contributes an analysis of how the use of text itself has changed in the digital context, as it becomes multimodal (combined with images, video, audio, and other sensory modalities). He further discusses how these changes complicate and enrich both the reading and creation of “texts” by requiring fluency with more media types. I believe that Kress’ work may have been the most organized, useful, and valuable of the readings.

Unfortunately (in my opinion), the primary authors spend too much time on too abstract a treatment of literacy itself. That is, the programs and philosophies they discuss tend to be about digital literacy (a phrase they are fond of). In this educator’s opinion, programs that use digital tools to teach subjects are more likely to be useful to students. This approach is not quite absent from the Briefing, but it is not the focus.

It is interesting that the final part of the Briefing, a “Response” by Fred Garnett, also strikes this reader as more interesting and better-thought-out than the primary authors’ contributions. Again, Garnett is careful to relate all theoretical points to real-world experiences and his overview lists uses of Digital Literacy (though he calls them “approaches”) rather than highly abstract idealizations of specific capabilities. He follows with a simple table showing methods that could be used to teach specific skill sets to students. This is another valuable and useful essay on the topic.

In “The Educated Blogger: Using Weblogs to Promote Literacy in the Classroom”, (2005) David Huffaker considers, not the nature of digital literacy, but the use of blogging tools to promote literacy in the traditional sense of textual communication skills. He does refer to “digital fluency,” using it in much the way the previous publication used “digital literacy.”

He does a good job of summarizing what a blog is, but statements like, “Adolescents make up a large part of the community of bloggers …” are already obsolete 10 years later, when adolescents are enormously more likely to be using Instagram than Blogger. It’s interesting that the article is aimed at an audience that literally doesn’t know what a blog is, and has never read one. This is not an assumption a writer would be likely to make in 2015, in this context. The article goes to great lengths to describe many potential benefits of using blogs in education, but cites no data supporting its actual utility. The only real-world examples given of blog usage in teaching are links to blogs that are being used. No research measuring their effects is mentioned.

Finally, I read “Literacy and the new technologies in school education: Meeting the l(IT)eracy challenge?” by Durrant and Green. As a former software developer and occasional computer journalist, I was immediately attracted to an article whose title contained the initialism “IT” (Information Technology).

The introductory portion is mostly of historical interest, being over 15 years out of date. Even its predictions only reach as late as 2007.

I think the hierarchy of literacy presented in Table 1 is quite useful, though it’s too linear–virtual reality is not “less primitive” or “more advanced” than digital/multimedia/hypertext. The various items shown as separate in the table in fact shade into each other. E.g. video literacy is not separate from “multimedia” as shown in the next line.

In general, the paper seems to be trying to provide a common vocabulary and a mental model for teachers to use as more information technology is introduced into their classrooms. It does not appear to contain specific suggestions for implementation or teaching. When a suggestion is made, it is always couched in terms of extreme abstraction, as in this sentence: “This means putting the emphasis firmly and clearly on authentic meaning-making and meaningful, appropriate action within a given community of practice.” It is notable that Durrant and Green never give specific examples of how to carry out their extremely indistinct mandates.

Looking at the readings as a whole, I have these reactions:

• Technology, and 21’st Century culture, change too rapidly for the previous model of academic publishing, or previous models of teacher training. Even in something only 5 years old, both technology and culture have moved on enough to reduce the paper’s impact.
• All the readings are aimed at classroom teachers of primary and secondary students. While I have taught science at the secondary level, 25 years of my career have been (and I hope, the remainder of it will be) devoted to the training of adult employees by large industrial businesses (and Soldiers of the United States Army). There are most certainly technical literacy-related problems in that area, and they are not addressed by these authors.
• The enormous majority of the material seems to assume “traditional” classroom-and-one-teacher settings. Little mention is made of self-paced online learning, distance learning, or on-demand learning.

Coming full circle to the Gillen and Barton quote above, the closing phrase strikes me as most relevant: “… use them to further their [the students’] own purposes in their own learning lives” None of the four readings, at least to my perception, really dealt with the students “own” purposes. They implicitly assume that the teacher selects the purpose for their pupils. This can be the right attitude in a scholastic setting, but in a business setting students tend to set their own priorities and this aspect of the topic was not dealt with.

I am now very tempted to write my own overview of the topic, dealing with it from a current perspective and a scientist’s viewpoint.