Educational dialogues – By Karen Littleton & Christine Howe

What are these “online literacies” that this substantial book talks about in the context of their possession by adolescent learners? By analogy with “computer literacy” and “IT literacy”, you may expect the phrase to mean the young users’ fluency with IT applications to solve their problems. Not so! In fact, neither the book’s editor nor the various authors give an explicit definition of what they mean by the term. The way in which this phrase is used in the book is, in fact, closer to the traditional meaning of ′′literacy′′ than to fluency with IT applications. I would define it on that basis as the young people’s ability to express themselves and interact with others—and by this means make sense of themselves, their experiences and the contexts in which they live.