Literacy+Definitions

Literacy was once defined as an understanding concept of print. However, the definition of literacy has become an intricate origami, each folded definition blending and working together to create a whole picture. Whereas print is the written word, today's new literacy requires us to include text from digital literacy as a form of written ideas. Literacy is both an individual process and social interaction. Today's children and adolescents work and struggle with, as well as choose from, a multimodality of literacy. Literacy is shaped with a social context and remains fluid and flexible to meet the needs of the society that shapes it. Literature genres and writing genres provide a plethora of materials teachers are able to incorporate into literacy instruction and are the engaging and creative works that draw readers and writers into life-long learning.

 We have given each concept of literacy the following definitions:

 Digital Literacy: The ability to understand, interpret, apply, analyse, and evaluate, digital tools as well as the ability to engage in social skills and strategies and cooperative learning to understand ideas, and the ability to create a means to communicate thoughts.

 Media Literacy: The ability to use, understand, interpret, apply, analyse, evaluate, and create informative websites, and other media literacy. There are many skills needed for new media literacies. For more information go to Project New Media Literacies from MIT

 New Literacy The use of multimodal texts, including the surrounding of the text with visuals such as color, and graphics, as a means to construct meaning, to create, and to convey information in cyberspace. (Because new literacies is fluid and is shaped with the social-context of use, this definition is a base and most likely will be refined) (Bennett, 2009).

 Popular Culture Texts Literacy: Literacy elements communicating widespread, popular elements of a society's culture and in that society or generation's vernacular language or use of mulitmodal texts.

Technoliteracy: Term used in European journal articles to discuss the combined use of technology and literacy where literacy takes place in "third-space" learning (Gutiérrez, KID. (2008). Developing a sociocritical literacy in the third space. Reading Research Quarterly 43(2) 148-164.

 Visual Digital Literacy: The ability to understand, interpret, apply, analyse, evaluate, and create visual texts such as photographs, videos, animations and other sources of technology media