Abstract
The purpose of this chapter is to position literacy and information and communication technology (ICT) skills as a new form of competency within education. Literacy education has historically been considered as the gatekeeper of social equity, mobility, and empowerment and has been implemented in educational programs around the world. It is only in the 1990s that ICT was introduced in education and the issue of social equality has become a topic of public discussion. Today, the discussion of equality and information literacy is scaled up to a global level. Therefore, I briefly introduce the argument that emerged in the research literature on literacy that seems to recur in the discussion of ICT in education and social development. Here, by social development, I specifically mean promotion of equity such as equal access and use of information and knowledge. I first discuss a more traditional ideology of literacy which defines literacy as acquirable skill necessary to “function” well in economic market. I then investigate the research on literacy and use of computer as “social practice” and move on looking at the information of literacy and empowerment.
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Notes
- 1.
I am also aware that literacy and technology are two very different mediums of communication. For example, the creation and the development of the Internet have altered the way we think of communication. Digital technology allows almost instantaneous exchanges of messages with sounds and images. The technological infrastructure for global communication is transforming the way in which we perceive time and space (Castells 1996).
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The UNESCO funded mass literacy program in Brazil has been considered as a failure because literacy program did not advocate economic development (Harman 1977).
- 3.
When technology was first introduced into the school system in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were two main lines of argument. One that supported the expansion of computer technology, welcoming it as a useful tutoring tool, allows efficient and individually tailored teaching for children, and the opposing position claimed that human beings could not be replaced by the machine. Regardless of the public debate, many school districts rushed into investing in technology, believing that technology would revolutionize education. Computers were often seen as useful and efficient tools for students and teachers. Thus, in the US a whole movement has been created to provide computers for all students in all schools (Kontogiannopoulou-Polydorides 1996).
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In the 1980s such betterment was mainly implemented through packaged software and tutorials to prepare for standardized tests. Computers were seen as ideal medium for improving test scores since it was believed that computers could deliver individualized learning with immediate feedback. Armstrong (2000) claims that with the development of CD-ROM technology, which offers a great amount of information delivered in a small package, progressive teachers switched from the “drill-and-kill” software to simulation programs and electronic encyclopedias. Since the 1980s, each time a new technology arises, schools have been forced to catch up with the new development. For instance, since the mid-1990s, the focus has been the Internet. It is seen as a research tool as well as communication tool that enables students to communicate across global boundaries.
- 5.
The concept of “multiple literacies” has emerged from this framework (Rasool 1999). Multiple literacies is a term created in an attempt to incorporate many facets of literacy use within different societies. Some typology used are: social literacies, cultural literacies, vernacular, local, or community literacies (Rasool 1999, p. 11) Social literacy include areas such as reading the newspaper, writing shopping lists. This is a type of literacy considered to be functional to everyday life. Cultural literacies, on the other hand, are embedded in “religious and ethnic-group-based cultural practices and may have high personal value associated with issues of groups and self-identity” (Rasool 1999, p. 11). Vernacular, local, or community literacies are associated with different subculture, communities, age, and gender groups. They tend to “obtain their relative value with particular, usually informal, contexts of interaction” (Rasool 1999, p. 11). The typology assumes that “multiple literacies” are instances of numerous kinds of “social fact” that are learned as a set of cultural knowledge.
- 6.
Marxist political theory would argue that this specific inequality is found in how the ideology of the dominant class is imposed upon the subordinate class. This view holds that the ideology of the dominant class permeates the actual consciousness of both the dominant and subordinate classes. Gramci goes beyond the idea of class ideology and redefines “hegemony” as a “whole social process” to the distribution of power and influence. While the traditional Marxist view of hegemony equates consciousness with the formal system that is abstracted as “ideology”, Gramci’s notion of hegemony does not reduce it to purest form of consciousness. Rather, it claims that the hegemony is realized only when it is practiced in the whole social process of everyday life. It is a “lived system of meaning and values-constitutive and constituting—which as they are experienced a practices appear as reciprocally confirming” (William 1977, p. 110).
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Iinuma, M. (2016). Literacy Theories in the Knowledge Society. In: Learning and Teaching with Technology in the Knowledge Society. SpringerBriefs in Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0144-4_1
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