Librarians have long been known to focus on literacy skills in their communities. But literacy is of course not monolithic. Besides reading skills, there are plenty of other literacies, such as financial literacy, computer literacy, research skills, interpersonal skills, career literacy, and so on, that librarians have worked on for decades.

Robin Davis and I focused on this topic a few years ago. We were interested in exploring bot literacy, or the ability to understand how bots work. These efforts produced some technical workshops for librarians and an article. My conclusion from this work is that understanding how bots work is very much a “threshold concept” in the sense of the ACRL Framework.

While Robin and I mostly drew upon an existing, long-standing literature on code literacy (Papert, diSessa, Kafai and Burke, Vee, etc.), I’m realizing now that we neglected to tie this to the parallel literature on literacy that produced the Framework. Now I think that there is more work to be done to bring together these two different conversations on literacy.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.