post 8: "The Future of Literacy"

Elementary school through high school, I remember being forced to read books picked out by my teachers. My parents also strongly encouraged me to read, and tried putting me in the more advanced reading groups, or honors English courses, which was probably a mistake because I was always the student in those groups of classes who didn’t read, or didn’t know what was going on in class. Teachers also encouraged us from a young age to do projects on the computer using all the different Microsoft programs, especially “Word,” “PowerPoint,” and “Publisher.” In middle school and high school I had to take keyboarding classes, which were the most pointless classes I’ve ever taken. They were taught to us as if we had never been around computers before in our lives. The truth is, most of us had already been so familiar with the key board through programs like AIM instant messenger, or Xanga (an online journal blog), that we could already type at a fast speed while rarely having to look down at the keyboard. I think a lot of the school systems ways of “teaching” literacy are outdated. Instructors need to prepare students to be able to function effectively in online communication environments of the 21^st century. As stated in the text, “To accomplish this task, educators, certainly those who teach English composition only in its more conventional forms, will need to change their attitudes about literacy in general, and they will need additional technology resources so that they can work more closely with students to earn about the new, self-sponsored media literacies these youngsters are developing and practicing online” (419).