What is literacy?

This NY Times Magazine article deals with the impact of digital technology on the literacy of blind learners. It describes the debate in the blind community between Braille readers and "listeners" who use text-to-speech technology, as well as research that investigates how the brain responds or adapts to these forms of learning, and whether listening without recognizing the underlying structure of language and writing constitutes literacy.

The implications of listening "readers" to sighted students intrigued me also. The author quoted one source who analyzed stories by non-Braille-using blind students who composed and editted their work by keyboarding and listening to the words played back:

In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate societies think differently than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said — the ability to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them — transformed the shape of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into a container, shaken and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.” The beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought emerging in the midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized sequence and complex thought that we value in a literate society.”

As I read drafts of compositions by our own students, some of these observations seem applicable; and I wonder how the sensory world of cell phones, YouTube, and iPods - as well as our own accommodations of Kindles and audio books influence a student's path to becoming literate, as we understand the word.