What does it mean to be literate in the age of Google?

Abstract

What does it mean to be literate at a time when you can search over billions of texts in less than 300 milliseconds? Although you might think that "literacy" is one of the great constants that transcends the ages, the skills of a literate person have changed substantially over time as texts and technology allow for new kinds of reading and understanding. Knowing how to read is just the beginning of it--knowing how to frame a question, pose a query, how to interpret the texts that you find, understand the information in context, how to organize and use the information you discover, how to understand your metacognition--these are all critical parts of being literate as well. In this talk I'll review what literacy is today, in the age of Google, and show how some very surprising and unexpected skills will turn out to be critical in the years ahead.