Edutopia - February/March 2008 - (Page 49) PROGRAMM ING: THE NEW LITERACY Power will soon belong to those who can master a variety of powerful and expressive human-machine interactions. By Marc Prensky lready, various thinkers about the future have proposed a number of candidates for the designation “twenty-first-century literacy.” That is, what are the key skills humans must possess in order to be considered literate? Some writers assume that the definition of literacy will continue to be what it always has been: “The ability to carefully read and write a contemporary spoken language.” Others specify that the term will apply only to fluency in one or more of the languages spoken by the largest numbers of people, those certain to be important over the next nine decades of the century; candidates include Spanish, English, or Mandarin Chinese. Still others expand the notion of twenty-first-century literacy beyond spoken and written language to include the panoply of skills often collected under the umbrella term multimedia (being able to both understand and create messages, communications, and works that include, or are constructed with, visual, aural, and haptic—that is, physical—elements as well as words). Some go on to find important emerging literacy in interactivity and games. And there are those who say it includes all of the above, and might include other factors as well. I am one of these last, in that I believe fluency with multiple spoken languages will continue to be important, and that multimedia, interactivity, and other game-derived devices will be increasingly significant tools for communicating twenty-first-century thought. Nonetheless, I firmly believe that the true key literacy of the new century lies outside all these domains. I believe the single skill that will, above all others, distinguish a literate person is programming literacy, the ability to make digital technology do whatever, within the possible She Walks the Walk: Marybeth Hamilton, an alumna of ULS, helps prepare her students for real life. EDUTOPIA.ORG EDUTOPIA 49 http://EDUTOPIA.ORG
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