Reading from an electronic device was out of imagination 25 years ago, a printed book as the way to go. In the last ten years the technology in changing so rapidly that sometime is hard to keep up. In the beginning of the technology boom, desktop and laptop was used as a commodity to read, but in nowadays smartphones are becoming day to day necessity to read and get information quickly and whenever we are. Kindle devices are used to access e-books and replace in a way the printed copy of a book for most of the youth generation. A printed book is the way to go and not the internet on wireless devices is the right path to knowledge, I think this is what most of teenagers are getting as an advice from their parent every day. This is an ongoing debate in every household between parents and their children.

According to Wolf reading is not a natural act, because there are not reading genes in human DNA [1]. Reading is more a cultural activity and has evolved since its inception. Our generation can totally confirm this fact since the deployment of technology.
Because of dramatic social and technological change we should be prepared to foster new types of literacy. Prof. Kellner at UCLA propose that we should take in consideration printed literacy, combined with media literacy, computer and information literacy [2].

According to National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) literacy is defined as task-based and skills-based. The task-based literacy focuses on what an adult can or cannot perform in the everyday literacy task. The skills-based literacy focuses on the knowledge and skills an adult must possess in order to perform these tasks [3].
The media has changed tremendously and literacy has been flexible and transformed itself during these years. A big list of tools and number of high technologies are what people can refer to media landscape of our days. According to Henry Jenkins there are not tools, but is our relationship and logic that are directing our media, and to understand this relationship we have to develop skills that will lead us to understand our contemporary media landscape [4].


When I think about the strong debate “Digital versus Print”, I cannot help myself and think about my two years old son Gerald. He is at that stage that a printed colorful children’s book will captivate him more than a wireless device. He knows how to turn on the laptop and smartphone, but he finds his movies characters more attractive in the printed copy of a book.  In this battle there no winners and losers, there are stages in life when a printed copy of a book would be helpful, and captivating as well as the technology would make our life easier at a faster pace. 



Reference:
[1] Maryanne Wolf, 2008. Proust and the squid: The story and science of the reading brain. New York: Harper Perennial, p.222.

[2] Kellner, Douglas, 2000. New Technologies/New Literacies: reconstructing education for the new millennium, Teaching Education, Vol. 11, No. 3, 2000.

[3] Institute of Education Sciences, 2007. National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) 2003 and National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) 1992 Public-Use Data Files.

[4] Jenkins, Henry, November, 2006. Eight Traits of the New Media Landscape, Retrieved from: http://henryjenkins.org/2006/11/eight_traits_of_the_new_media.html

“The distinctive contribution of the approach to literacy as social practice lies in the ways in which it involves careful and sensitive attention to what people do with texts, how they make sense of them and use them to further their own purposes in their own learning lives” (Gillen and Barton, 2010, p. 9).

I think that the new technology and internet are heavily promoting literacy and according to Huffaker literacy remains paramount in learning, not only for language development, but also as the foundation of all academic disciplines [1]. Weblogs promote self-expression and creativity because anyone can share their critical thinking and beliefs. My concern is how the self-expression is going affect the other readers.

People are eager to get information using different approaches such as textbooks, search engines, and weblogs. The ability to know when there is a need for information, to be able to identify, locate, evaluate, and effectively use that information is defined as information literacy by the United States National Forum [2]. The difference between people looking for information stands in their ability to identify the reliable sources. When the internet wasn’t widely used the information was primary filtered because the textbooks or artistic books, journals or printed magazines where more selective and the credibility of the authors where primary established.

In nowadays and with the evolvement of digital technology anyone can publish information online in blogs or Wikipedia.

References:

1.      Huffaker, D. (2005). The educated blogger: Using weblogs to promote literacy in the classroom. AACE Journal, 13(2), 91-98.

2.      What is the NFIL?". National Forum on Information Literacy. Retrieved September 15, 2013.