I was intrigued by the changes of literacy with young children inspired by technology back in 2014 shortly after I joined the program. I think that the online reading has made challenges for young readers in a way and also facilitate learning to some extent. Technologies are tools and its success in teaching/learning depends on how they are used. I mean there is no good or bad criteria in a general sense. But I hold my viewpoint that tech has made reading/writing much more complicated for younger learners. For those who were born since 2010 when the tablet era poured in, mobile devices have experienced a big revolution moving from clicking the mouse to swiping on the screens. The swiping makes it easier for those small hands to work on those screens and thus make these devices more accessible. What's more, many apps and websites began to develop more user-friendly features in educational games, books, and videos. Researchers have done surveys to understand the perceptions of parents. pre-service teachers with those mobile devices.
Leu and his colleagues have proposed the idea of New Literacy and new literacies a few years ago. I think that I feel that right now, the differences between the upper case and lower case is more conceptual than practical. When taking teaching and learning into consideration, we are talking more about TPACK. It is easier said than done though, as teachers are not only taking care of the individual differences of their students, the up-to-date content area, but technology is changing every day!
The more I think of digital literacy, the more complicated I think the problem is. It is different reading on a laptop, a tablet, or a mobile phone. It is different to read on Kindle or Nook. It is different when multimedia is incorporated into reading. Reading on a desktop computer with mouse definitely involves different skills with touchscreen tablets. So how would we define digital literacies then?
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