Gen Y Literacy

"For SEO, search engines use spiders and robots to scan for meta-tags and key words." If you understand that sentence, congratulations! If not, welcome to the emerging literacy of technology and its vocabulary. This is a literacy, challenging or inviting, depending on your perspective (or perhaps your age!), that makes us all learners. The foundation elements of literacy are phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and motivation. These apply not only to the young child just acquiring such skills, but also to those of us well equipped for previous technologies of literacy but recently recognizing challenges to our vocabulary and comprehension domains. We can still pass notes, play Scrabble, conduct research, compose sonnets, or read novels, but the technology and often the vocabulary of it is changing how we do those. The Gen Y's are teaching their parents and grandparents.