Misar- Computational Literacy and Computational Thinking

Computational Literacy and Computational Thinking

As a student in the reading education program at Vanderbilt, I have spent a lot of time thinking about the definition of literacy and how one gets there. DiSessa provides a definition on page 23 “Literacy is a socially widespread patterned 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” and supports it with three pillars- materials, cognitive, and social aspects.

I was not shocked that he gave this definition, it reminds me of what Elizbeth Moje said in 2010 in her paper “Re-framing Adolescent Literacy Research for New Times: Studying Youth as a Resource”. She says, “When they focus primarily on literacy learning of children and adults, theorists, researchers, and policy makers, whether professing literacy to be a cognitive process, a social practice, or a political tool, betray a belief that literacy learning ends in childhood, only to be remediated in adulthood if not learned correctly in the early years”(p. 211-212). Throughout this paper, she lays out an argument for re-examining how literacy is taught to adolescents and how research in adolescent literacy is providing more information about the increasing complexities of different academic content areas.

On our fourth class in Dr. Rowe’s Literacy Development course, we examined three models of literacy Adams, Goodman, and Rumelhart- who each explore how students construct meaning from text- specifically looking at what diSessa regards as only two pillars of literacy- materials and cognitive aspects. In understand her argument to be that different genres and different people will view and use text in different ways to communicate different things; and since they are all using similar text and thinking critically about it, the combination of all of these makes literacy a socially accepted practice for communication. Andrea DiSessa argues that once the practice is socially accepted then information can be shared between a diverse group of people and points to her earlier depictions of Galileo’s theorems. I guess, I’m struggling with the idea that to be literate isn’t just an individual definition it is a social one. Which brings me to Grover and Pea’s definition of Computational Thinking; I see their understanding of computational thinking to be a social endeavor. Looking at their long list of elements making up computational thinking, the majority must be cultivated through working with others. Computational thinking has more specific criteria and skills than computational literacy.