Tales of Literacy for the 21st Century : The Literary Agenda.
- 1st ed.
- 1 online resource (211 pages)
- The Literary Agenda Series .
- The Literary Agenda Series .
Cover -- The Literary Agenda: Tales of Literacy for the 21st Century -- Copyright -- Series Introduction -- Contents -- List of Figures -- 1: Introduction -- Working assumptions -- Structure of the book -- Notes -- 2: A Linguist's Tale -- A linguistic primer for oral and written language -- Phonology -- Four tiers of sound -- Morphology -- Syntax -- Semantics -- Pragmatics -- Orthography -- The linguist's tale of a bear -- Notes -- 3: A Child's Tale -- On turning ten -- Pre-reading can last a very long time -- What's in a word -- What's in a letter -- What's in the visual cortex -- What is not in a word, a letter, or the visual cortex for the non-literate person -- The first "revolution in the brain" -- Literacy and child's play -- Notes -- 4: A Neuroscientist's Tale of Words -- Overview -- Tales of words-structural, temporal, and physiological -- A few basic design principles that allowed us to read -- Connectivity and neuroplasticity -- Retinotopic and tonotopic organization principles -- Working groups / cell assemblies -- Plato, Socrates, and who taught whom -- Eidolon-imaging the word through processes of attention and vision -- Attention -- Vision -- Onoma-retrieving the name of the word -- Finding the name -- Meanings-connecting semantic and syntactic systems -- Semantic contributions to the meaning of a word -- Syntactic contributions to understanding the word -- Notes -- 5: The Deep Reading Brain -- Episteme-connecting the name to the reader's knowledge -- Entry processes-imagery, perspective-taking, and background knowledge -- Imagery -- Perspective-taking -- Background knowledge -- Metacognitive "scientific method" processes-analogical, inferential, and critical analytical abilities -- Analogy as bridge -- Inferential abilities (observation, deduction, and induction) -- Critical analyses. Generativity processes: the time for insight and novel thought -- "Towards a neural signature of insight" -- Generativity -- Notes -- 6: A Second Revolution in the Brain -- Habits of the young and old -- The changing nature of attention and its effects -- Distraction and its sources -- How we attend affects how we read: the "new norms" in reading -- The relationship between how we attend and what we read -- Information: how much is too much? Knowledge: how much is too little? -- Deep reading and what comes next -- A first algorithm for what comes next -- Notes -- 7: A Tale of Hope for Non-Literate Children -- History of the project -- Principles and framework for first deployments -- Tablet content principles and the app map -- Immediate first goals -- First assessment -- Next steps -- Summary and next directions -- Notes -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Selected Bibliography -- Index.
Being Literate in the 21st Century tackles some of the most difficult questions for the next generation around literacy and thought, as we continue to move into a digital culture. It explores research from multiple disciplines on what it means to be literate, and addresses the problem of universal literacy.