Howard Rheingold focuses on five things he calls 21-st century literacies:
- Attention - how you direct it, how you focus it
- Participation - "to inform, persuade, and influence"
- Collaboration - "doing things together"
- Network awareness - how they function, and the role of reputation and reciprocity
- Critical consumption - figuring out who is trustworthy
Honestly, I'm not enthused with this depiction of 21st century literacies. Readers will note they bear little resemblance to what I would describe under the same heading. These literacies are to me rooted firmly in the world of pre-network thinking. Rheingold may be working with the idea of content as a stream (that seems to me to be the common thread here; danah boyd, in the next article, appeals to it explicitly) but it's still content, and it's still a transmission mode of thinking. See more articles from the current EDUCAUSE Review.
This post, from Alexandre Enkerli, is to my mind a much more sophisticated discussion of these issues. Rheingold and boyd talk about how to become, in effect, what Enkerli would call 'social butterflies' (vis-a-vis the social butterfly effect). Enkerli sharply says, "People who participate in different (sub)networks, who make such (sub)networks sparser, are having unpredictable and unmeasurable effects on what is transmitted through the network(s).... Malcolm Gladwell (probably 'inspired' by somebody else) has used 'connectors' to label a fairly similar category of people and, given Gladwell's notoriety in some circles, the name has resonance in some contexts (mostly 'business-focused people,' I would say, with a clear idea in my mind of thegroupthink worldview implied)."
A 'literacy' that is fundamentally based in entrenching existing power structures and generally accepted world views is not worth having.
- Attention - how you direct it, how you focus it
- Participation - "to inform, persuade, and influence"
- Collaboration - "doing things together"
- Network awareness - how they function, and the role of reputation and reciprocity
- Critical consumption - figuring out who is trustworthy
Honestly, I'm not enthused with this depiction of 21st century literacies. Readers will note they bear little resemblance to what I would describe under the same heading. These literacies are to me rooted firmly in the world of pre-network thinking. Rheingold may be working with the idea of content as a stream (that seems to me to be the common thread here; danah boyd, in the next article, appeals to it explicitly) but it's still content, and it's still a transmission mode of thinking. See more articles from the current EDUCAUSE Review.
This post, from Alexandre Enkerli, is to my mind a much more sophisticated discussion of these issues. Rheingold and boyd talk about how to become, in effect, what Enkerli would call 'social butterflies' (vis-a-vis the social butterfly effect). Enkerli sharply says, "People who participate in different (sub)networks, who make such (sub)networks sparser, are having unpredictable and unmeasurable effects on what is transmitted through the network(s).... Malcolm Gladwell (probably 'inspired' by somebody else) has used 'connectors' to label a fairly similar category of people and, given Gladwell's notoriety in some circles, the name has resonance in some contexts (mostly 'business-focused people,' I would say, with a clear idea in my mind of the
A 'literacy' that is fundamentally based in entrenching existing power structures and generally accepted world views is not worth having.
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