Literacy in a Digital Age 3

Verhaal

John O'Leary is the president of Frontier College, an organization which historically took to the wilds of Canada in order to teach working men and women how to read. In this talk, O'Leary looks back at the history of the college as well as the current challenges it faces in bringing literacy to the new frontier -- Canada's inner cities. Robert Logan is a noted physicist ... which might make him seem an unlikely choice to address a conference on the future of literacy. But Logan is also author of The Alphabet Effect, an influential book which argues that one reason for the rise of `Western' science is our alphabet. That the ability to think symbolically arose from our language, and drove technological advance. Logan looks not only at the origins of technological innovation, but also how literacy alters the way we think. Part 2: George Steiner George Steiner is one of the world's leading literary theorists. In this talk, Steiner addresses the fundamental questions of literacy: what does it mean to be `literate'? Does literacy always correlate to intelligence? And are we really moving into a post-literate age, or will we always cling to literacy? All three talks were delivered to the Living Literacies conference at York University.