There has bee a lots of discussion about what it means to be literate in the 21st Century and if there is such a thing as 21st century literacy.

Ryan Bretag’s The Great Literacy Debate, Ben Gray’s post 21st century confusion and  21st century clarification. There have been discussions on twitter and plurk and these lead to Will Richardson  coordinating an illuminate discussion of the topic.

I have never been great with semantics but I do know there are many things we all need to know. We need to know how to speak, read, write and communicate in a variety of media.  We need to responsible users and publishers of information.  We need to know how to search and mange a vast amount of information.  We need to analytical and critical thinkers. We need to determine if information is relevant, reliable and credible.

Nothing refocuses our need to teach these skills more then the recent phishing attacks on twitter that even caught those who should know and Miguel Guhlin’s lesson on the need to be critical reader’s of the web. Needless to say we still have a long way go.