2 Classes of Digital Natives?

This article by James Gee on the Huffington Post suggests that there are two classes of literacy - basic literacy that ends you up in a working class job, which now most likely means a low-paid service job, and academic literacy which gets you through college and maybe grad school and lets you speak the language of "research, empirical reasoning and logical argumentation."

Gee suggests that there is a correlation with digital literacy. There are those who can talk about what they are reading and doing online, and those who can talk about how it all works. "He gives an example from a World of Warcraft discussion site. We are evolving a class of people, often self-taught, who can speak the digital language and function in the digital world in ways that get them employed without having to get formal credentials. His question is - is this a new premium class of literacy, or is it the same people who mastered academic literacy? It would require some research to answer this question, but it certainly raised the question for literacy practitioners of what we are really teaching. In digital skills as well as other literacy skills, there are the basics that help you survive, and then the more critical thinking skills that help you thrive and excel.

Twitter

Alan Lew has a blog post about Twitter, where he has pulled together a bunch of references and discussions, and suggested various educational uses. Twitter is blocked at my work as we have youth correctional sites on our network, so I can't use it as much as I'd like to, Can't even grab a screen shot for this post. But I'm interested in how learners might use this service. It is writing, after all. Is Twitter part of the new literacy?

Some Quotes

I'm trying to catch up on email today, and finding some quotes, about technology and about literacy, that I want to keep. Here are 3.

Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination.
--Albert Einstein

I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
--Stephen Jay Gould, 1980

Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the universe.
--Kurt Vonnegut, in Hocus Pocus, 1990