Modern Definition of Literacy

the increasing multiplicity and integration of significant modes of meaning-making, where the textual is also related to the visual, the audio, the spatial, the behavioral, and so on ... particularly important in the mass media, multimedia, and in an electronic hypermedia. (New London Group, 1996, p. 64)

 The Common Task

The learned, who have fragmented science into a multiplicity of branches, imagine that the calamities that strike and oppress us are within the competence of specialised disciplines to control, whereas in fact they constitute a single problem common to all of us, namely the lack of kinship relations between a blind force and rational beings. This blind force makes no demand on us other than to endow it with what it lacks: rational direction, or regulation. Yet no regulation is possible owin...