ABSTRACT
The scope of literacy in a digital age is vastly expanding. This introductory chapter explores technology’s impact on historical and current views of what it means to be literate. Literacy is described broadly as being able to read, write, listen, speak, view, and visually represent information in order to communicate and understand. Today’s students can select from an expanded range of literacies to understand, create, and communicate. The addition of a multiple literacies, or multiliteracies, perspective is applied to explain the plurality of literacy, or literacies, that continue to shift the boundaries of how and what we teach and use in the classroom. The multimodal nature of communication requires a consideration for the expansion of our views of traditional reading and writing skills, so we embrace these multiple literacies. Teachers feel this expansion in their classrooms as the demands of literacy continue to change. This chapter reviews terminology, including definitions of multiliteracies such as digital literacy, information literacy, web literacy, and transliteracy, in order to support an understanding of the shift in thinking about literacy.
