Reconstructing Technoliteracy: A Multiple Literacies Approach

Abstract

The ongoing debate about the nature and benefits of technoliteracy is without a doubt one of the most hotly contested topics in education today. Alongside their related analyses and recommen-dations, the last two decades have seen a variety of state and corporate stake holders, academic disciplinary factions, cultural interests, and social organizations ranging from the local to the global weigh in with competing definitions of "technological literacy." Whereas utopian notions such as Marshall McLuhan's "global village" (1964) and H.G. Wells's "world brain" (1938) imagined a technological world of growing unity in diversity, ours is perhaps better characterized as the highly complex and socio-politically stratified global culture of media spectacle and the ever-developing mega-technics of a worldwide information (Castells 1996), cum technocapitalist infotainment society (Kellner, 2003a: 11–15). As such, there is presently little reason to expect general agreement as regards what types of knowledge are entailed by technoliteracy, what sorts of practices might most greatly inform it, or even as to what institutional formations technoliteracy can best serve and be served by in kind.KeywordsTechnological LiteracyMulticultural EducationCritical PedagogyTechnological TransformationDefense Advance Research Project AgencyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.