“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who can’t read & write,
but those who can’t learn, unlearn & relearn.” – Alvin Toffler
So what is literacy?
The first time I listened to an audio book I thought I was cheating. As a child, reading for me seemed like a lot of work, and my teachers kept piling on more reading assignments, continually feeding into the notion that reading is hard work.
Later, I rationalized that the process of reading is the process of taking characters on a page and turning them into mental concepts and images. Listening to an audio book is a little different process where we convert sounds into mental concepts and images.
Today, when someone talks about literacy there is an instant assumption that they are talking about the ability to read and write – basic ink-on-paper communications 1.0. However, communications is evolving and our ability to craft words and preserve them on paper is being replaced with digital forms of communications, and the options people now have to communicate with each other have exploded into thousands and thousands of nuanced variations of what was formerly called language.
Tomorrow there will be even more.