Educational Leadership's Literacy 2.0

In Educational Leadership's current issue(a publication of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development), each article centers around a theme of Literacy 2.0. One entire article is devoted to defining 2.0 literacies.

Personally, terms like Web 2.0 or words beginning with i make me cringe. Do we really want to start numbering our collective advancements of ICTs and literacy practices? Does literacy 2.0 accurately reflect that language and communication have been changing and responding to human activities for thousands of years before wikis and blogs? Was all of human language prior to the printing press the equivalent of the literacy beta-test?

Back to the current issue of Ed Leadership, Naomi Baron contributed an article about mobile technologies' effects on speech and written language. While much of it is similar to her discussions in Always On, it does highlight the preoccupation of the popular press with the superficial effects of acronyms popping up in student speech and writing. Baron argues that relaxed attitudes towards grammar and spelling may be more detrimental.