• Technological prowess. This is the ability to get things into and out of the machine.  The ability to click a mouse or swipe an iPad is a basic example. The ability to design or program a video game would be an advanced example.
• The ability to evaluate information, entities and environments. This is the skill set that allows one to determine if the content on a website is reliable, if a person or group of people are who they purport to be, and if a given virtual environment is the right place to be.
• The ability to exploit the environment.  Such exploitation might take the form of earning money, making friends, developing a business network.

This is my take away from Literacy and Learning in the Digital Age, a new class I developed at Pratt SILS. I taught it this fall and will do it again next fall.

Here are some of the readings:

Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Second Edition: Revised and Updated Edition

Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook

Perspectives on Culture, Technology And Communication: The Media Ecology (Hampton Press Communication)

Eye candy from the NYPL Digital Gallery.

The publication will be one of the culminating pieces of Project M-LEAD, an IMLS funded project at SILS and the Brooklyn Museum, that supports internships for 30 students preparing Information Professionals for careers in Museum Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age.

Blackface Imagery and Its Answers: Stereotyping from the Early Civil Rights Era to the Obama Era

June 28, Monday, 7:00 pm
$5 non-members, free (members & students)

For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights explores the historic role of visual culture in shaping, influencing, and transforming the fight for racial equality and justice in the United States from the late 1940s to the mid 1970s. This exhibition of 230 photographs, objects and clips from television and film looks at the extent to which the rise of the modern civil rights movement paralleled the birth of television and the popularity of picture magazines and other forms of visual mass media.

This is the first major project I have been involved in since opening my own shop last year.  I created the educational materials that will accompany the online exhibition.

Maurice Berger, the exhibition’s curator, has published a companion book.

The show opens at International Center of Photography in New York (21 May to 12 September 2010) and will travel to  the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (tentatively, 15 June to 30 October 2011); and the Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture, UMBC (September 2012 to January 2013). Other venues will be announced.