Emergent Digital Literacy

After taking the digital natives quiz, I would have to classify myself as a digital immigrant. I was only able to identify the entire meaning of three of the terms; I also feel as though they are the most common and well known ideas of technology that were included in the quiz (Blog, Wiki, and IM). Before this semester, I thought that I had a pretty solid understanding of technology. However, now that I am being exposed to more and more ideas through our course, I’ve come to the conclusion that I still have a lot to learn. Thompson thinks of “emergent” as the first stage that young children encounter when learning to read and write. When it comes to my digital literacy that I will be completing my project on (cultural literacy), I feel that it is safe to categorize myself under the emergent category as well. Thompson explains the emergent stage as when “young children gain an understanding of the communicative purpose or print and develop an interest in reading and writing”; it is also expressed as the stage where children develop concepts and notice aspects of literacy in the environment or world around them.
Although the emergent stage within Thompson’s text is referring to the ‘emergent’ stage of reading and writing, I can very much see myself falling under this category when it comes to learning and teaching myself about cultural literacy. I know so little about that topic now, that I am at the stage where I am attempting to gain a beginning understanding and develop some concrete examples of what cultural literacy entails. I will begin to put together aspects of this idea and form my understanding, similar to how children use phonemic awareness and decoding to learn their words. As we discussed in class, students have many tools at their assistance during the emergent stage. An example of this is seen with the vowel rules, or fluency rules. I plan on replacing those methods used by younger students with research on cultural literacy in order to complete our digital literacy project.