National Coalition for Literacy

—A Guest Blog Discussion Series on the Importance of Social Innovation

for Adult Literacy

August 1 – September 16, 2011

Introduction by Heidi Silver-Pacuilla

Technology and social innovations are changing our relationship with education and knowledge. Schools and instructors are no longer the font of knowledge. Individuals can now ACCESS an ocean of educative experiences, CREATE them, and SHARE them with known and unknown colleagues. If you’ve ever contributed to Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, or the NCL blog, you’ve created new knowledge for the rest of us to find.

But oceans are big and difficult to navigate.  We need some charts, GPS locations, buoys, and friendly ports where instructors and learners can get their bearings and leverage the opportunities. This summer, NCL has a guest blog series that will discuss aspects of social innovations that can have a positive impact on adult education’s relationship to technology, a topic NCL has explored for months (see related blog discussions).

How do you define digital literacy? Stop and take a minute to think about this and articulate your own answer.

When I had the chance to ask this question of adult students in Washington, DC this summer, they unanimously included in their answers the ability to find, apply for, and engage in employment. My own teenage son found a job through an ad posted on Craigslist – a social innovation community site. (If you haven’t seen it lately, don’t worry. It still looks just like a digital bulletin board.)

What are skills we all should possess to be considered digitally literate in 2011? How do we get up to speed? Guest bloggers will help us understand the challenges and solutions from various perspectives.

To get us started, I’ve reviewed some of the new Pew Internet and the American Life survey reports that document just how “mobile” American adults’ access to the internet has become.  A study released on July 11 shows that 1/3 of American adults own a smart phone that allows them to access the internet and email on the go. The characteristics of this group of smart phone owners have shown a consistent trend over the past several years. High-income groups have high adoption, but so do some low-income groups.  “African-Americans and Latinos are more likely than whites to use their cell phones for non-voice applications such as using the internet, playing games, or accessing multimedia content. These differences extend to smartphone ownership as well, as 44% of black and Latino adults are smartphone owners, compared with 30% of whites“ (p. 9).

Pertinent to our conversation, the report finds that “usage of smartphones as a primary internet access device is highest among several groups with relatively low rates of traditional internet and broadband adoption—for example, those with no college experience as well as those with relatively low income levels” (p. 14). Adoption and daily use is highest in the 25-34 year-old set, across income, gender, and ethnic groups.  Those who are employed full- or part-time are more likely to own a smart phone, as well.

Dale Lipshultz, American Library Association’s (ALA) Literacy Officer in the Office for Literacy and Outreach Services (OLOS) and a past president of the National Coalition for Literacy, and her colleagues at ALA, have championed the term “digital literacy” in public policy and for increased funding for libraries as “the people’s university.”  And, in fact, the data shows that computer use is WAY up at public libraries as more people are using the public access for personal and professional use. See this Gates Foundation report. A joint ALA-NCL blog discussion on the topic of public access and digital literacy will be held here on the NCL Blog August 1 – 12, 2011.

• August 1: Dale Lipschultz will blog about library services, adult literacy and e-readers.
• August 5: Larra Clark and Marijke Visser, ALA/OITP, will blog about what’s happening at ALA regarding digital literacy now and in the near future.
• August 8: ALA Members of the Digital Literacy Task Force will blog about the impact of digital literacy on libraries on adult learners.

Steve Reder, Professor at Portland State University, will join us to talk about his newest project, funded by the Department of Commerce, to bring high-speed broadband access to the communities left behind. Broadband is heralded as a marker of quality: the teaching videos, interactive webinars, and online simulations that require such high bandwidth are becoming a marker of the digital divide. See our earlier post on this topic. Steve will talk about how the communities that are collaborating with his project are using informal learning experiences and settings to teach digital literacy. Join him online between August 22 – September 2, 2011.

Anne Murr, Director of the Virtual Literacy Project at Drake University, part of Iowa Reads, will join us between August 15 – 26, 2011. Her project searches out social innovations such as mobile devices and software applications that can serve as assistive technologies for literacy learners. Always on the lookout for low-cost options, they have been very creative in their ability to leverage these tools for literacy learning, embedding them in adults’ authentic needs for literacy such as employment, parenting, finance, and health care.

How do we convince established and new partners and funders to expand their investments in adult education so that we can access, create, and share more resources with adults? Debra Jones, California Director of Adult Education and Chair of the NAEPDC Research Work Group, will join us to discuss her recently co-authored paper on The Return on Investment from Adult Education and Training. The value in raising an adult’s literacy―traditional and digital―is far-reaching and lasting. Debra will discuss ways to frame the argument and data points to document the benefits. Join her online between September 12 – 16, 2011.