New Literacies

New Literacies
New literacy refers to the new approaches to literacy, for example, the computer literacy, comparing to traditional definition of literacy. Because of the advent of new technology, the definition of literacy is changed from printed text to hyper text and from paper to digital format. It includes knowledge acquired from all different sources, printed or electronic.
Therefore, the school media centers need to introduce all different formats of literacy to students, classrooms too. Students not only need to learn how to locate information from books, they also need to learn the skills to search information electronically. The capability to retrieve digital information is the new literacy and is the significant factor to acquire new and broad knowledge. Traditional materials are not longer enough to satisfy our need for new information. The information and news are changed too fast for printed materials to be updated.
Since the nature of reading changes today, information retrieving skills need to be enhanced, the learning strategy needs to be altered, and classroom instructions need to be adapted accordingly to new generation of technology. Librarians and teachers should spend more time in such training workshops. There should be more workshops to be held to satisfy this demand.
New literacy and the traditional literacy are supplemental to each other. It may be better to define new literacy comprises the traditional literacy and computer literacy. To be literate, we can’t ignore the importance of either one.