Thinking Critically about Technological Literacy: Developing a Framework to Guide Computer Pedagogy in Technical Communication

Issues related to technological literacy can provide a useful frame for thinking critically about computer-based instruction in technical communication. This article identifies issues of technological literacy related to performance, contextual factors, and linguistic activities. When considered collectively, these issues provide technical communication students with a mechanism to identify and analyze a range of perspectives associated with technology and communication.     

Technological Literacy: A Framework for Teaching Technical Communication Software Tools

Understanding technological literacy for technical communicators is crucial for effective pedagogy in technical and professional communication. Challenges of teaching technical communication students the functions and concepts of workplace software include the number of rapidly changing applications, a desire to focus on education over training, limited faculty expertise in software, limited resources for teaching software, and a desire to focus on technical communication principles. To address these challenges, the authors explore how to use a four-level framework of technological literacy along with existing resources to design a course to help students use, understand, and evaluate technical communication technology.     

Critical Engagement with Technology in the Computer Classroom

This article proposes a model for critically engaging technology in technical communication graduate curricula. While computers and writing studies concentrates on academic writing, the development of the field provides a model for engaging technological issues in professional and classroom contexts. Technical communicators have an ethical as well as intellectual responsibility to engage the interface between technology and culture. This article describes one example, a graduate class in information architecture, as a model for engaging the nexus of literacy, technology, and culture.     

Critical Engagement with Technology in the Computer Classroom

This article proposes a model for critically engaging technology in technical communication graduate curricula. While computers and writing studies concentrates on academic writing, the development of the field provides a model for engaging technological issues in professional and classroom contexts. Technical communicators have an ethical as well as intellectual responsibility to engage the interface between technology and culture. This article describes one example, a graduate class in information architecture, as a model for engaging the nexus of literacy, technology, and culture.     

Technological Literacy as Network Building

Following recent work to advocate a strongly social understanding of technological literacy, this article considers how networking technologies are reshaping our understanding of the social. In this context, technological literacy can be understood as a process of constructing the networks in which literate action is defined. I explore the role of technological literacy as a force of network building accomplished through a mechanism of translation. From the comments of experienced technical communicators, I make observations about how technical communicators are taught to be technologically literate.     

网络视阈下高校辅导员信息素养内涵探析

以互联网为核心,以信息与交流技术为代表的新技术革命,给高校辅导员工作带来了巨大的挑战和机遇。文章从信息意识和信息能力两大方面探索了网络视阈下高校辅导员的信息素养,从而为高校辅导员工作提供参考。     

高职学生的技术素养结构及培养路径

技术能够推动人类文明的繁荣和社会经济的发展,技术素养更是技能型人才应对工作挑战的必备素养。在技术和素养内涵分析的基础上把技术素养分为技术知识与能力、技术思维与技术精神三层结构,并提出高职学生应具有的技术素养,即工作情境知识、工作方法知识、工具设备知识、技术设计能力、技术物化能力,系统思维、工程思维以及工匠精神。依据高职学生技术素养三个维度提出高职学生技术素养的培养路径,即：融入问题情境,培养学生发现问题的能力;剖析现实案例,促进学生知识结构的生成;设计可能性方案,提高学生的技术创新能力;鼓励动手实践,提升学生的技术素养;引导学生回顾反思,强化学生的技术精神。     

The Literacy Component of Mathematical and Scientific Literacy

This opening article of the Special Issue makes an argument for parallel definitions of scientific literacy and mathematical literacy that have shared features: importance of general cognitive and metacognitive abilities and reasoning/thinking and discipline-specific language, habits-of-mind/emotional dispositions, and information communication technology strategies to prepare people for adult life and democratic citizenship. These frameworks provide potential insights into research and pedagogy. Furthermore, they provide guidelines for second-generation standards, curriculum development and assessment so as not to overlook or underemphasize the fundamental literacy component of mathematical and scientific literacy for all students, which can result in fuller participation in the public debate about science, mathematics, technology, society, and environment issues.     

Asking the ‘Right’ Questions. Identifying Issues in Developing a Technological Solution

It is well established that technological education is not just about the development of technical expertise. A socially constructed view of technology aims to recognise the culture of technology. Technology education as expressed in the New Zealand curriculum provides an opportunity for societal issues to have equal space with technological capability and technological knowledge. However, when technological activities focus on solutions it is all too easy for stakeholders' positions to be ignored. There is a need for a teaching approach to engage in a liberating technological literacy discourse where values and beliefs of all participants directly and indirectly involved in the activity, are examined. This research monitored a professional development programme where identification of the values represented in a familiar object provided a model for discussion and the development of a teaching environment that promoted consideration of values during problem-solving. The data have been collected from primary school teachers who developed teaching programmes for Years 1 to 8 (5–12 years).     

Conceptualisations of literacy and literacy practices for children with severe learning difficulties

Literacy is traditionally narrowly conceptualised as a set of skills related to accessing and generating written or printed text. For children designated as having severe learning difficulties (SLD), who are unlikely to develop these ‘conventional’ literacy skills, such a conception implies their semi‐literacy or nonliteracy. Although conceptions of multimodal literacy and multiliteracies have rarely been applied to this group, broader understandings of literacy that include a range of activities, modes and media provide greater opportunities for including these learners in literacy practices. Drawing upon our research with teachers of this group of children and young people, we illustrate these literacy practices. We note, however, that such practices are often haphazard, not coherently thought through, and that there is much confusion regarding any distinction between communication and literacy. We argue for literacy as a specific form of communication, but conclude that broader models of literacies should be utilised to guide and support practitioners in developing interactive practice and in making reasoned and principled approaches and decisions about literacy practices, routes and progression for children with SLD.     

Broadening the base of a technical communication program: An industrial/academic alliance

Developing alliances with industry may be one of the primary factors in creating a technical communication program that blends sound rhetorical theory and pedagogy with the discourse knowledge of technical communication practitioners. Creating an Advisory Board is one way to forge this alliance. This article describes how such a board was created, the influence it had upon program development, and the insights both industry and academia gained from this alliance. Although industry and academia are not the same, both had overlapping goals: to develop a symbiotic relationship that would provide students and faculty with the technological expertise practicing technical communicators could offer, but, at the same time, to provide a construct true to the missions of a liberal education.     

The science/technology interaction: Implications for science literacy

Science literacy includes understanding technology. This raises questions about the role of technology in science education as well as in general education. To explore these questions, this article begins with a brief history of technology education as it relates to science education and discusses how new conceptions of science and technological literacy are moving beyond the dichotomies that formerly characterized the relationship between science and technology education. It describes how Benchmarks for Science Literacy, the National Science Education Standards, and the Standards for Technological Literacy have been making a case for introducing technology studies into general education. Examples of specific technological concepts fundamental for science literacy are provided. Using one example from the design of structures, the article examines how understanding about design (i. e., understanding constraints, trade‐offs, and failures) is relevant to science literacy. This example also raises teaching and learning issues, including the extent to which technology‐based activities can address scientific and technological concepts. The article also examines how research can provide guides for potential interactions between science and technology and concludes with reflections on the changes needed, such as the creation of curriculum models that establish fruitful interactions between science and technology education, for students to attain an understanding of technology. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 38: 715–729, 2001     

Visual metadiscourse: Designing the considerate text

Visual metadiscourse can provide design criteria for authors when considering the needs and expectations of readers. The linguistic concept of metadiscourse is expanded from the textual realm to the visual realm, where authors have many necessary design considerations as they attempt to help readers navigate through and understand documents. These considerations, both textual and visual, also help construct the ethos of authors, as design features reveal awareness of visual literacy and of the communication context. Visual metadiscourse complements textual metadiscourse in emphasizing the necessity of rhetoric in technical communication.     

Getting the Feel: Email Usage in a Nonprofit Community Organization in a Low-Income Community

Through in-depth interviews of 26 employees, this study examined how social norms and values influence email usage in a nonprofit organization in a low-income urban community. Although adequate technical infrastructure was in place, a shared norm on getting a feel in social interactions reinforced face-to-face communication as the primary mode of communication among members. This norm, coupled with a lack of computer literacy and of technical support, led to low email usage and slow adaptation to external technological change. These findings revealed the importance of improving members' technical competence to experience a feel in computer-mediated communication before initiating changes in technology use.     

An analysis of the programme for international student assessment 2000 (PISA 2000) mathematical literacy data for brazilian, japanese and norwegian students

A linear structural model was studied to investigate the factors affecting reading literacy and mathematical literacy skills of 15-year-old students in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2000 data across different cultural settings. Brazil, Japan, and Norway were selected for the purpose of comparison on the basis of their rankings in the PISA 2000 study. The factors studied were attitudes towards reading, student-teacher relations, classroom climate, communication with parents, use of technology, attitudes towards mathematics, and reading literacy. The results indicated that the latent independent variable with the strongest effect on mathematical literacy is the use of technology in Brazil, communication with parents in Japan, and attitudes towards reading in Norway. In all the three countries, reading literacy has the strongest effect on mathematical literacy skills; mathematical literacy has a stronger relation to attitudes towards mathematics; attitudes towards reading is negatively related to mathematical literacy measures but positively related to reading literacy measures, and finally, communication with parents has a positive relation with reading literacy skills. A disciplined classroom environment fosters more success in PISA tests in Japan; on the other hand, in Brazil a reversed result is found for this particular variable. The use of technology has a strong influence on reading skills in Brazil; however, no and negative effects of this variable are observed in Norway and Japan respectively. These findings are discussed with reference to cultural context.     

“Bridging the Gap between Food Pantries and the Kitchen Table”: Teaching Embodied Literacy in the Technical Communication Classroom

Drawing from literature on communication as a physical, material experience, this article expands Cargile Cook’s “layered literacies” (2002) pedagogical framework to include a seventh literacy—embodied literacy. The article uses a classroom case study in which students coproduced a cookbook with low-income, elderly, disabled users, to demonstrate how students can become more responsible and effective technical communicators by recognizing users’ divergent embodied experiences. The article includes suggestions for concrete classroom practices that encourage such embodied literacy.     

Reflections on Plowden

ICT can make a useful contribution to the development of early literacy but exploiting this potential in developmentally appropriate ways requires early years educators to meet the challenge of outlining the ways and means this process requires. As early years professionals we need to think not only about the ways in which ICT can help to enhance our current practices in literacy but also about how our concept of literacy itself might need to change. Clarifying our view of our role and responsibilities in relation to technological change and young children's literacy experiences in a rapidly changing world of communication could be one way of ensuring that at least some of these changes meet our needs and those of the children we work with.     

数字素养概念与内涵辨析——兼与信息素养、媒介素养、技术素养的比较

数字素养是计算机、教育学等学科研究热点。但随着技术素养、信息素养等新概念被提出,出现了混淆或误解的情况。因此,为避免今后研究中出现概念模糊、重点要素遗漏等问题,采用文献研究法,从概念时代背景、内涵等多个方面进行探讨,并以对比的形式理清相关概念区别和联系。研究发现,不同的概念均是依据时代对不同知识技能需求而产生的,且各有侧重,概念之间既有补充也有包含关系,数字素养作为最近提出的概念,具备更深层和更广泛的特点。     

Relocating the Value of Work: Technical Communication in a Post-Industrial Age

This article analyzes the location of “value” in technical communication contexts, arguing that current models of technical communication embrace an outdated, self-deprecating, industrial approach subordinating information to concrete technological products. By rethinking technical communication in terms of Reich's “symbolic-analytic work”, technical communicators and educators can move into a post-industrial model of work that prioritizes information and communication, with benefits to both technical communicators and users.     

Primary school literacy in Southern Africa: African perspectives

This research review examines trends in recent scholarship concerning primary school literacy instruction in Southern Africa. Past scholarship, particularly that which originated from western researchers, focused on technical or structural issues facing literacy instruction in the region, such as language of instruction, school conditions, availability of books, and teacher training. Newer scholarship that has emerged primarily from African researchers focuses more on sociocultural and sociopolitical issues such as promoting a ‘reading culture’, shaping language policy, and examining literacy as a local social practice. Increasingly, researchers advocate local, rather than western/northern, solutions to African problems in literacy development and instruction. However, African perspectives are nevertheless influenced by western perspectives and agendas, as a result of colonialism, postcolonialism, and globalisation. Hybrid solutions that combine western and African perspectives therefore may be important for literacy development in the region.