Dr. Daniel Russel Zaption Tour
Are
you literate? What does it mean to be literate in the 21st Century? Watch this
Zaption tutorial created by Dave Malone to see what Dr. Daniel Russell, a
research scientist at Google and author of Mindtools, has to say on
the topic.
http://zapt.io/tkn6ttn8
Zaption Q 1:
Q:How has your own literacy changed over your lifetime?
My literacy has changed a lot over the course of my five decades on this earth because there have been so many changes during that time. Obviously, most of this has to do with languages and vocabulary, but it can also be cultural or conceptual.
My own language acquisition history is pretty typical: non-verbal communication, to babbling, to early utterances, to words, to phrases, to sentences, to paragraphs or stories, to essays or pieces of writing and speaking proficiently in the many genres, both formal and informal. Playground speak/write is different from academic speak/write, and it still is when you grow up.
Then there are the specialized vocabulary skills sets that begin to define you as an individual. As a child, I would have known those for gymnastics, and the Westward Movement, and Jane Austen, etc. As an adult I have learned even more languages with their corresponding vocabularies, like finances, and parenting, and teacher vocabulary. When I started piano lessons a year ago, I added yet another vocabulary set. When I began studying Spanish and then French I added two more.
Finally, there are conceptual components to literacy and languages. For example, idioms can be difficult for second language learners as there may be underlying bodies of prior knowledge that don't transfer or are not intuitive. For example, "Here's looking at you.." is an abbreviated quote from a popular movie and there is a lot of back story to it. (Humphrey Bogart to Ingrid Bergman in “Casablanca”). Consider the relatively new science word "timespace" that is conceptually packed with background knowledge. You can "learn" that word; you can read what it means in Wikipedia, but it is still very difficult to truly conceive that time is not the same for everyone and that it depends on your relative motion.
Clearly, in this Transliteracy course we are learning that technology and the Information Age is not just a new body of information that one needs to acquire in order to say that they are "literate" today, but it is also a new type of literacy with new vocabulary, new syntax and new conceptual components of its own. What is perhaps different about Transliteracy than other new "languages" is the rate of acceleration of all three areas.
Zaption Q 2:
How does one demonstrate literacy in this day and age?
Today, the notion of a "Renaissance Man", one who could be fairly knowledgeable on all the important topics of the day (math, science, languages, etc.) is dead.
The Renaissance Man for the 21st Century (RM21) is not a man, or a woman, or a child, who "knows most of all there is to know". Now, he is a person who knows how to "find" what he "needs to know" in a given situation. The new RM21 can navigate through the glut of information in the Information Age and come out with an answer that has been vetted through the lens of critical thinking. The "Carpet Baggers" of the Information Age can not prey on the RM21 because he has learned how to identify persuasive techniques, how to check multiple sources, and how to verify the accuracy of information found. ~ Kathy Moorehead
http://zapt.io/tkn6ttn8
Zaption Q 1:
Q:How has your own literacy changed over your lifetime?
My literacy has changed a lot over the course of my five decades on this earth because there have been so many changes during that time. Obviously, most of this has to do with languages and vocabulary, but it can also be cultural or conceptual.
My own language acquisition history is pretty typical: non-verbal communication, to babbling, to early utterances, to words, to phrases, to sentences, to paragraphs or stories, to essays or pieces of writing and speaking proficiently in the many genres, both formal and informal. Playground speak/write is different from academic speak/write, and it still is when you grow up.
Then there are the specialized vocabulary skills sets that begin to define you as an individual. As a child, I would have known those for gymnastics, and the Westward Movement, and Jane Austen, etc. As an adult I have learned even more languages with their corresponding vocabularies, like finances, and parenting, and teacher vocabulary. When I started piano lessons a year ago, I added yet another vocabulary set. When I began studying Spanish and then French I added two more.
Finally, there are conceptual components to literacy and languages. For example, idioms can be difficult for second language learners as there may be underlying bodies of prior knowledge that don't transfer or are not intuitive. For example, "Here's looking at you.." is an abbreviated quote from a popular movie and there is a lot of back story to it. (Humphrey Bogart to Ingrid Bergman in “Casablanca”). Consider the relatively new science word "timespace" that is conceptually packed with background knowledge. You can "learn" that word; you can read what it means in Wikipedia, but it is still very difficult to truly conceive that time is not the same for everyone and that it depends on your relative motion.
Clearly, in this Transliteracy course we are learning that technology and the Information Age is not just a new body of information that one needs to acquire in order to say that they are "literate" today, but it is also a new type of literacy with new vocabulary, new syntax and new conceptual components of its own. What is perhaps different about Transliteracy than other new "languages" is the rate of acceleration of all three areas.
Zaption Q 2:
How does one demonstrate literacy in this day and age?
Today, the notion of a "Renaissance Man", one who could be fairly knowledgeable on all the important topics of the day (math, science, languages, etc.) is dead.
The Renaissance Man for the 21st Century (RM21) is not a man, or a woman, or a child, who "knows most of all there is to know". Now, he is a person who knows how to "find" what he "needs to know" in a given situation. The new RM21 can navigate through the glut of information in the Information Age and come out with an answer that has been vetted through the lens of critical thinking. The "Carpet Baggers" of the Information Age can not prey on the RM21 because he has learned how to identify persuasive techniques, how to check multiple sources, and how to verify the accuracy of information found. ~ Kathy Moorehead