Contemporary literacy

I'm currently doing a course Introduction to Emerging Technologies through the University of Manitoba, which is the motivation for this blog - a way to record my thoughts about what we are learning, and to store links to information, opinions and tools.

In a discussion of Personal Learnning Environments (more about them later) one of the instructors, Dave, said that what he sees as new about being literate today, is that we don't need to remember information, we need to be able to find information when we require it. We grab bits and pieces from a wide range of sources as we go through our lives, and we need to keep track of these for when we need them.

To do this Dave suggests we require two things:

• A network of people and a quick efficient way of connecting with them.
• A mechanism for categorising, storing and retrieving the information we locate.

This is where Web 2.0 applications like Skype and NetVibes come into play.