Reflections on Digital Literacy for Today's Citizenry

Tonight in our LTT class we have been discussing various definitions of literacy, from a basic meaning of reading and writing text to communicating in multiple contexts. Digital literacy to me means having the basic skills to manipulate efficiently digital media to acquire information, communicate with other people, and share ideas. Just as we old guys used typewriters, rotary phones, fax machines and VCR's, today's young (and older) people who want to succeed in the world need to be able to use computers, cellular phones, email, blogs and social networking to see what is happening out there in the world and get their message out.