Timothy Colon's Journal For SUNY Empire

     For this week's assignment, we had to provide our thoughts on the literacy debate explained in The New York Times article from 2008 "R U Really Reading" by the journalist Motoko Rich. In her writing she presented differing viewpoints on whether reading and communicating online actually counted as literacy. Webster's Dictionary  defines "literacy" as, "the quality or state of being literate". Searching for their definition of "literate" you'll find, "able to read and write". However, as I spoke about in my first journal post, how able someone is when it comes to reading and writing (literacy) can vary depending on the circumstance. One may be literate in the English language but not in another. One may be literate in one subject like physics so they can understand a physics paper, but then they may struggle understanding Shakespeare. Literacy is a tool. You need the right tool to do the job. The ability to read and write...

  "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)  They way I see this text is that it explains literacy as a tool. It isn't simply one object that you obtain to use in one way. Instead, it's used in a wide variety of ways to for many purposes. Whatever anyone wants to achieve, they can use texts to further their own ambitions. Not all literacy is the same. For instance, reading a scientific journal is much different than how one would read a historic speech. Each new use of text requires (at least to some degree) a new skillset. If someone wants to be any sort of scientist, they would need to know the writing conventions of their medium. Knowing how to write a scientific paper however, does not qualify them to ...