ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the concept of coding as literacy by looking at the societal and historical aspects as well as the cognitive theories aimed at understanding literacy. Reading and writing are technologies of textual literacy, while coding is a technology of computational literacy. Each of these technologies is associated with particular tools, and tools can be defined as implements that support or enable the use of the symbolic or infrastructural technologies. Revising and editing become major tasks in textual literacy, much like debugging in computational literacy. Computational literacy has historical, social, communicative, and civic commonalities with textual literacy. Literacy has the power to bring about social change. Literacy needs technologies. These technologies allow actions and thinking. The technologies of reading and writing vary, and different tools can be used; for example, the printing press supports the mass communication of ideas, while handwritten scrolls assign exclusivity.
