From The Economist – Digital Literacy
By no means is the topic of Instructional Technology limited to the halls of academia. Because this is a topic of culture, the implications of the technological revolution in daily life are far reaching. Recently I found an excellent article on Digital Literacy in The Economist, a news source far removed from the daily life of most students. The article argues, fairly successfully, that literacy in the digital world carries a different, but complementary, weight with literacy in the conventional written word sense, and that in some senses, the idea of literacy is as much in flux as everything else. As a bonus for the geeks amongst us, it uses Babylon 5 as a positive example.
An excerpt from the article:
Cultural observers bemoan the way electronic media—with their demand for spectacle and brevity—have shortened our attention spans. But as a blogger on Eastgate.com noted recently, that equates brevity with debased taste, and sees patience for long stories as a mark of high culture. But if brevity is to be deplored, what should we make of haiku, sonnets, and ink-brush calligraphy?
