Technological Literacy. Research into Practice Series No. 4.

This booklet, which was written for adult literacy practitioners in Australia, examines some key issues currently being raised about new information technologies and technological literacy. The following are among the topics discussed in the booklet's nine sections: innovation and dissemination (effects of videocassette recorders, computers, and the Internet on home entertainment, education, workplace practice, and literacy requirements); multiliteracies (print, critical, technological, and information literacy); technologies (their relationship to social activities and relations and the notion of "virtual" communities); the global village and the potential of new information technologies to democratize information; the space-time compression of postmodern technological society; the virtual workplace and the erosion of the old distinctions between the public sphere of work and the private sphere of home and household; hybrid textualities (hypertext, changing reading practices, and the discourse structures of e-mail); body and identity (the invisibility and irrelevance of bodily differences in digital hyperspace and issues of anonymity, privacy, and security in cyberspace); and pedagogy (the role of computers and other new technologies in literacy instruction, second language learning; and distance education programs). Contains 47 references. (MN)