ABSTRACT

Variously modulated across the chapters of this book is a concept of literacy as a social practice which, like its learning, is therefore always contingent on cultural and historical contexts and available technologies. This chapter also takes such a view of literacy—or more properly literacies—and explores the relationship of print–based, alphabetically encoded ‘letteracy’ to newer forms of electronically mediated literacy—the ‘computency’ (Green, 1988; Bigum and Green, 1993) which aligns competence in literacy with computers.