Darphin - Computational Literacy and Computational Thinking

I was awed by diSessa’s description of literacy and its three pillars: material, cognitive, and social.   diSessa defined literacy as a “socially widespread pattern deployment of skills and capabilities in a context of material support (that is, it is an exercise of material intelligence) to achieve valued intellectual ends (pg. 23).”  diSessa’s first chapter expanded my view of computational literacy and literacy in general. I expected the main difference between computational literacy and computational thinking to be computational literacy necessitates the use of a computing device.  Including the aspect of a socially widespread patterns implies literacy is not something to be achieved, but something that exists in society and is desirable to master.  The cognitive impact of this type of literacies is particularly poignant: “Literacies leave traces of themselves in autonomous thinking, making us smarter even when we’re not in the presence of the material form (1999 pg.19).  I think diSessa’s description of literacy suggests that computational literacy enables computational thinking to happen.  Once the skills and capabilities of CT/CL discussed are widespread in society in conjunction with computing devices, traces of these skills will become autonomous in our thinking - this is when computational thinking happens.