My comrade in editorial arms, Gaynor Backhouse, is quoted in today’s Guardian about the long term future of higher education. She puts forward an idea that we have been debating in the office recently: reality literacy.
Where the current concern of educators is digital literacy – the ability to judge the provenance of information on the Web – in 20 years’ time the problem is more likely to be connected to our ability to judge what is real. In the Guardian piece Gaynor makes the point that we are likely to see the widespread use of virtual reality and virtual worlds in education. The technologies that support this – advanced displays and haptic (touch) interfaces – will make today’s VR, like Second Life, look positively clunky. We may even have a situation in which we have to train the young in reality literacy – discerning real life from virtual worlds.
Tags: Guardian, reality literacy, virtual reality, VR
Tech Lunch 
February 17, 2009 at 4:11 pm |
I suppose this is a logical step on from kids speaking in deriviations of Hacksaw, the mobile txt lang.
I have a 5 yr old son and he is active in his reading of corporate identity, we are working on the litracy transfer to real writing at the moment but I suppose A is still for Apple which ever way one looks at it.
B is for Ball or Blog
C is for Cat or Computer
D is for Dog or Digital or DVD etc…
I feel a new digital age alphabet coming on.
Alan
February 20, 2009 at 11:45 am |
[…] The good geeks alphabet As it is Friday an I am winding down for a weekend of the Guardian and children (sadly not in that order) I was reading my fave local tech blog and came across this https://techlun.ch/2009/01/20/reality-literacy/ […]
April 7, 2009 at 1:53 pm |
As somebody working in media literacy I found Gaynors article very perceptive. I will also further add that perhaps we are already in the realms of the semi-real, that space where celebrity artifice and the ordinary folk collide, and although dreams and aspirations are positive things, to be famous for its own sake is a dream devoid of substance or goals. Pete Waterman has a lot to answer for. Mr. Baudrillard would be proud.
The arguement about depth of understanding verus Richard Hammond I will elave for another time.