When I was growing up in the 1970s we all had a pretty clear idea of what it meant to be "literate" — literacy, coupled with basic numeracy, was the mainstay of junior-school education, and these basic skills served us well for decades. Times, however, have changed and it's about time we revisited our notions of literacy for the digital age.
This 20th-century notion of literacy has, I believe, mutated as the world has evolved in the face of a barrage of technologies that allow for different forms of expression and different levels of interaction: both with media and with other readers, writers, producers and editors.
While we talk of ELT, ESL, Esol, in other spheres people increasingly refer to DSL – Digital as a Second Language. And if, like me, you were born before the early 1990s, then you're likely to be a "non-native" speaker of DSL, and perhaps struggling in the face of so many proficient speakers in your English language classrooms.
So is the digital world so wildly different from the analogue one most of us grew up in? I sincerely believe it is. To be literate today involves more than the "three Rs" of reading, writing and arithmetic. It requires skills to navigate a connected world, a world that is both much smaller geographically and – at the same time – much bigger, in pure information terms, than the one we knew BG (Before Google).
Take text, as one example. In my youth text was largely confined to the printed page, in books, magazines and other publications. One couldn't "touch" text, as one can now with the scalable screen representation of text on a tablet computer such as an iPad. And one certainly couldn't interact with text, using it as a starting point for an adventure, a research project or a conversation with people on the other side of the globe. Yet hypertext, texting and other types of print literacy are as common and familiar to the digital generation as picture books were to mine.
What of search and information literacy? Few would argue that today the ability to find information on the internet, and be able to evaluate its usefulness, veracity and potential application in the classroom, is perhaps the most vital component of these new literacies.
Digging further into the digital literacy skillset, we might identify more social and intercultural literacies. The ubiquity of social networks demands a new range of skills: looking after one's "digital footprint" is of paramount importance, both professionally and personally. Knowing what to share, and who to share it with, is a vital part of this process; keeping yourself safe and maintaining hierarchical relationships is both challenging and potentially problematic in a wired world. Learning how to interact with other cultures and world-views is now a part of everyone's daily life.
Engaging with these literacies in the English language classroom is getting easier through a variety of developments and initiatives. Not the least of these is the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) movement, which encourages people to make use of the gadgets they — and their learners — have with them, rather than relying on institutional policies or provision.
Also high on the list of enablers is the "flipped classroom", where the "spadework" associated with a particular subject is done outside school, leaving classroom time for more creative practice and personal attention. Providing this kind of differentiated instruction can be improved significantly through the judicious use of technologies.
Still inhibiting large-scale adoption of any kind, however, is the continuing lack of professional development in the use of technologies – nearly 20 years after I first started training teachers to use technologies there is still little mention of them on pre- and in-service teacher training courses, and teachers are still largely left to fend for themselves in a world where the pace of development usually outstrips either the time or the energy to keep up.
Until the ELT profession recognises (as most others seem to have) that technology is as much a part of personal and professional life as pens or books, I fear that we will continue to short-change an increasingly digitally literate client base and fail to play our part in equipping them for their unpredictable futures.
As the technology blogger Mike Sansone notes, while the digital generation may be "tech-comfy", they are often far from being "tech-savvy", and perhaps this is where teachers come in; taking advantage of their comfort levels with technologies, we can help them towards a realisation of what all this "connectedness" can do in terms of their knowledge, education and preparedness to enter a workplace where they are studying for jobs that don't yet exist.
However, if we remain largely illiterate in digital terms, we risk ending up as an irrelevant nuisance in the day-to-day lives of the people we profess to help.
Gavin Dudeney is director of technology at the online training and development consultancy The Consultants-E. He is currently writing a book on digital literacies with Nicky Hockly and Mark Pegrum. For further reading he recommends Mark Pegrum's From Blogs to Bombs: The Future of Digital Technologies in Education