This column is reprinted from the Technology department of the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy (JAAL). It contains the following sections:

• Author's Message
• Issue of the Month
• Interpretations
• Literacy Web Page of the Month
• Web Sites to Visit
• Glossary

In the September Technology column I talked about the way literacy practices are changing along with new technologies. That picture of step-by-step changes is a convenient one, but it tells only part of the story. For one thing, the kind of literacy associated with one set of media for reading and writing does not go away when new media, such as the mass-produced book or the computer, become available. Instead of replacing one kind of literacy with another, we add to our repertoire.

But we don't just add either; we change the ways we enact literacy. In the realm of popular media, we see that television did not replace radio, although it did lead to changes in the ways that people used the earlier technology. Rather than sitting in front of the radio at home with family and friends, we took portable radios with us in the car, to the beach, or to work, and began wearing radio headsets. The content transformed along with the hardware, as radio drama and variety programs gave way to news and recorded music. In a similar way, we add to our ways of making and interpreting texts, and change the occasions for these practices. People still use quill pens and calligraphy brushes, although generally for aesthetic and symbolic rather than daily functional purposes.

Along with adding new technologies for literacy, and changing the ways in which we use older technologies, we also create literacies that are hybrids of existing practices. We can see the great variety of these new literacies reflected in the electronic journals now coming online. Some of the periodicals appearing online look very much like their printed counterparts. Others add interactive features, more graphics, even video. Many have links to web sites, and many become sites for collaboration through online discussion groups.

As these e-journals become more commonplace, they alter what the September JAAL editorial referred to as first-wave technologies (such as television), as well as the print-based technologies (such as newspapers) that preceded them. Each of these technologies undergoes changes as we develop our understanding of them and interact with them in new ways. We now see, for example, that newspapers not only cover the digital revolution, but that their format begins to take on characteristics of web pages, such as extensive use of graphics, cross-indexing, and even citations of URLs.

These multiple literacies make new demands on readers and writers and on those who are helping students to develop their literacy skills. Moreover, they challenge all of us to become aware that we are actively involved in shaping the very technologies we use.

Back to top
Back to listing of all JAAL Technology columns available in Reading Online

It is no longer the case that we can easily separate the use of new technologies in literacy from standard practices. More often than not, literacy means combining a variety of new and old tools in creative ways; we have to develop hybrid practices that moot the question of whether to use new technologies at all.

I saw this variety in a course I taught recentlyfor preservice teachers. In this course, every student createda set of Web pages. Working with students in that process remindedme how much we are all caught between new and old literacies.For example, two students gave me their web project on a floppydisk in an ordinary envelope. What they had written on the envelopeappears in the figure.

This text exemplifies the complex, changing, and hybridized literacies today's students need to learn. Physically, it consists of a standard envelope, but one that contains a magnetic disk. In spite of the impressive storage capacity of the disk, it turns out to be more effective to communicate using the blank paper of the envelope and a felt-tip pen. On the other hand, they ask for questions back via e-mail. They use hybrid morphemes, such as “b/c” for “because,” drawing perhaps on e-mail discourse and web pages they have seen. Their text is created “all in Microsoft Word,” but using the HyperText Markup Language, or HTML, format appropriate for the web. Mike and Linda are unconsciously creating a hybrid medium, one that combines paper and pen, floppy disk, and e-mail in a unique way. They could have constructed a different hybrid, for instance, by e-mailing the files or their envelope message, or by requesting a response on paper.

Mike and Linda say this is their finished web page, but of course the web page isn't the envelope or even the disk, but information that won't be on the web until it's posted on a server, and they have no idea how to do that. In fact, they know more than they claim, because they have created the documents for a fine web site, using a word processor that supports hypertext. And they know that somehow the various files on the disk need to be transferred to a larger disk on the university Internet server. Although they are still learning, their knowledge is impressive enough to be daunting to some people.

As they are learning how to use these new technologies to accomplish a given task, Mike and Linda are doing something perhaps even more important. They use the web as a way to represent themselves. In this case, their web page becomes a portfolio that they use when seeking a teaching job. But the flexibility of the web format makes it possible to portray many aspects of personal identity to the world. Many young people now have Web pages proclaiming, “All About Me!” with links to pictures, friends, pets, favorite music, hobbies, and more. As a medium for these portrayals, the web supports diverse, hybrid representations that express the diverse, hybrid character of societies and individuals today.

We see on the web aspects of both old and new literacies intermingled and continually reconstructed. Even a technology as basic as e-mail developed in this way: About three decades ago, file transfer programs were developed to move large data files from one computer on the Arpanet to another. Early users realized that they needed to communicate with the person receiving the file at a distant site if they were to use the new technology effectively for transferring those files. Fortunately, they quickly saw that one kind of file they could transfer was a message to the other person. Moreover, they could send messages about any topic. Thus was e-mail invented out of file transfers. This process of appropriation of technology has made the history of technological change dynamic and difficult to predict. In a similar way, Mike and Linda are moving rapidly to become literate in new forms without abandoning the old. They appropriate certain practices, alter others, and blend them with both old and new needs to accomplish their purposes. In so doing, they become not just users of the new technologies, but active constructors of it.

Back to top
Back to listing of all JAAL Technology columns available in Reading Online

Literacy has never been more central to work than it is today, and not just literacy, but “literacies,” the multiple forms of literate practice that new technologies and new forms of social organization have brought about. The new literacies entail not only basic reading and writing, but also “soft skills,” such as the ability to use reading and writing to solve problems and to communicate complex information. Successful practice of this kind of literacy is part of “knowledge work.”

“By the end of this century knowledge workers will make up a third or more of the work force in the United States—as large a proportion as manufacturing workers ever made up, except in wartime” (Peter Drucker, November 1994, “The age of social transformation,” Atlantic Monthly, p. 62).

“[E]mployers now look for hard and soft skills that applicantswouldn't have needed 20 years ago:

• The ability to read and write at the ninth-grade level or higher
• The ability to do math at the ninth-grade level or higher
• The ability to solve semistructured problems where hypothesesmust be formed and tested
• The ability to work in groups with persons of various backgrounds
• The ability to communicate effectively, both orally and in writing
• The ability to use personal computers to carry out simple taskslike word processing”

(Richard Murnane & Frank Levy, 1996, Teaching the New BasicSkills, New York: Martin Kessler Books, pp. 31-32).

Back to top
Back to listing of all JAAL Technology columns available in Reading Online

NewJour, a comprehensive list of e-journals and other serial publications. In January 1998, NewJour added its 5,000th journal. The list's precursor was the Association of Research Libraries' directory of electronic journals, newsletters, and discussion groups, first published in 1991 by Ann Okerson.

Back to top
Back to listing of all JAAL Technology columns available in Reading Online

Electronic journals concerned with adolescent and adult literacy:

• Reading Online, an electronic journal published by the International Reading Association. The audience is literacy educators interested in using the Internet for research, instruction, and communication. Features peer-reviewed interactive articles, reviews of print and nonprint materials, and ongoing professional dialogue about critical issues in literacy education.
• Library Trends , a quarterly journal that explores trends in library design and use. Each issue is devoted to a single theme from special libraries to emerging technologies. The site includes only abstracts and ordering information.
• Computers and Composition includes descriptions of computer-aided writing and reading instruction; personal accounts of teaching experiences; explorations of ethical, legal, and social issues around computers and writing; and discussions of how computers affect the form and content of written discourse, or the process by which it is produced and interpreted. There is both a print and an online version; the latter employs audio, video, and hypertext.
• Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language: An Electronic Journal, a quarterly listserv journal on the teaching of English as a second or foreign language. It includes studies in ESL/EFL pedagogy, second language acquisition, language assessment, and applied socio- and psycholinguistics. Subscribe by sending the message “sub teslj-l firstname lastname” to listserv@cmsa.berkeley.edu.
• The Virtual University Gazette , a monthly newsletter for distance learning professionals. It contains job announcements, updates on programs, and short articles on issues in technology-enhanced distance education, especially for adult learners.

Back to top
Back to listing of all JAAL Technology columns available in Reading Online

Arpanet: a network of computers designed to allow researchers to share expensive computer resources. It was created in 1969 at Bolt Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and was the forerunner of the Internet, the infrastructure for the World Wide Web.

E-journal: a journal in electronic form. In some cases, an e-journal may appear as a World Wide Web page, with a URL; in others it is delivered by electronic mail, usually through a listserv.

First-wave technologies: communication/information technologies, such as radio, television, audiorecording, videorecording, cinema, and telephone, which operate primarily with analog representations of information. These technologies have been primarily used for one-way delivery of information, but there are many exceptions.

Header: information included with an e-mail message such as who sent it, the date of sending, and the subject of the message. A full header can show the path that the message traveled, where an automatic reply will be sent, the message priority, and other features.

Hybrid literacy: a way of producing and interpreting texts that combines aspects of two or more sets of literate practices. For example, discussion on a moderated list may call for a unique blend of certain academic conventions for writing along with other conventions about friendly social interchange. The particular blend is in turn dependent upon technological features such as how the listserv program displays messages and headers.

Listserv: an Internet service that allows a group of people to communicate via e-mail by sending mail to a single electronic address. Messages are forwarded to each person on a designated list and are often archived for future reference. Listserv communications vary greatly, including informal conversations, moderated list discussions, and formal publications, such as e-journals.

Moderated list: an electronic e-mail list with a moderator who may initiate and guide discussions, review messages for appropriateness, or issue periodic summaries.

Second-wave technologies: communication/information technologies, such as computers, the Internet, the World Wide Web, and digital video, which operate primarily with digital representations of information. These technologies present great opportunities for two-way communication.

URL: Uniform Resource Locator, an electronic address, typically one designating a computer file on the World Wide Web, such as www.reading.org. The URL system allows millions of computers, each containing thousands of files, to refer consistently to specific resources.

Back to top
Back to listing of all JAAL Technology columns available in Reading Online