Strictly Literate

Children are cute when they hold books upside down. But even the pushiest of parents wouldn't call this 'literacy'. Young children sometimes fool their parents into thinking they can count due to a combination of wishful thinking and the Clever Hans effect. The same thing rarely happens with literacy.

What about Digital Literacy? Can even older children persuade their parents and teachers that they are literate?

Once, sitting by the side of a lake in Spain, I saw a snake. It rose out of the water, swayed and cause a commotion. Soon, a cry went up, "Especialista, especialista!"

The latinate term, the beard and heavy-rimmed glasses, the khaki shorts and walking boots - accompanied by a weighty tome - gave the 'specialist' an academic air. He looked exactly like the kind of man who would present educational TV shows, earnestly narrating the death of panicked docile beasts at the paws of predators, solemnly describing the brutal mating rituals of creatures humping like pistons.

The crowd parted and hushed respectfully. He approached the snake cautiously. I prepared for edification, my travellers' anecdote already formed.

I have no real memory of what happened next. The confusion, the foreign language, the non sequitur - all I remember was the shock as the specialist slammed the book down on the snake, killing it instantly. The crowd cheered and went back to their picnics. There was blood on the rocks. I thought, "Snakes have red blood?"

The especialista had fooled me (and only me) into thinking he was literate. This is not what books are for.

This is one of the reasons that literacy, as a concept, has worked. Books are only for one thing. The same is not true - at all - for digital media. It seems like Digital Media aren't mature until they've been repurposed or hacked.

None of the popular digital media now are soley (or even mainly) used for the purposes for which they were designed. Some of them weren't even designed with a specific purpose in mind. How are teachers, parents and employers supposed to deal with this? If my children start killing snakes with Digital Media what should their teachers do?

Who decides whether it's okay to hold digital books upside down?

[The title of this post is a reference to Strictly Ballroom. If you haven't seen it, you should.

This post was prompted by Doug Belshaw's (@dajbelshaw) "Watch my Ed.D. thesis grow in real-time…" project - he's putting his 'What does it mean to be Digitally Literate?' thesis online as he writes it. Very webby. Utterly foolhardy.

This post was also prompted by Ira Socol's (@irasocol) comments ("one of those really concise shift statements that makes me bend my own frame a bit") on a post by Dean Shareski (Ideas and Thoughts) - which I picked up on via Weblogg-ed.com in a post on Digital Inclusion

You'll notice that this post is only slightly related to both of these.]