Post-literacy education focuses on maintaining literacy in adults who have recently acquired functional reading skills. It includes research and resources for higher education and digital media. It also teaches information literacy, community resources, and the role of electronic media in literacy. There is debate on whether digital media enhances or detracts from reading skills.
Post-literacy is an area of adult education that focuses on maintaining literacy in people who have recently acquired functional reading skills. It includes research and use of available resources for higher education and for strengthening existing skills. A major area of post-literacy education also involves the role of digital media as part of a literate environment. This type of adult education is designed both to lower the average number of illiterate adults and to provide them with the tools they need to continue to benefit from the ability to understand written text.
Teaching post-literacy often overlaps with teaching some aspects of information literacy. Many adult education specialists agree that recognizing text correctly is only a beginning part of becoming fully literate. Students also need to be able to locate specific texts and evaluate them for their usefulness for both information and entertainment. Comparisons of separate texts and identification of author biases are additional skills covered in post-literacy training. Unlike other types of higher education that focus on teaching specific job skills, this type of education can be used in any area of life that involves interpreting information.
Another important part of post-literacy education is done at the community level in areas with higher rates of emerging adult literacy. Such measures include making libraries and book exchanges available to people who otherwise would have had little access to them. These community resources provide both traditional printed materials and other means for ongoing learning. Many post literacy measures can be seen in libraries providing learning opportunities that blend reading with the use of technology.
The role of electronic media is often an area of debate between educators and researchers who study post-literacy in depth. Some of them believe that digital media are gradually eclipsing written text as the primary source of information. They often warn that this trend could eventually lead to a backward fall in literacy rates, with the result that adults are able to obtain surface information through video clips, pictures, audio clips and short texts online but are not able to understand long passages of complex writing in depth. Another group of scholars take the opposite view and argue that digital media enhance rather than detract from reading skills among adult learners. These researchers often point out that adult literacy is a fluid rather than a static area of continuing education that keeps changing with technological developments.
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