Functional Literacy

Functional literacy has been described as being "reduced to a simple nuts-and-bolts matter" and just mastering techniques (p.32), neutral and decontextualized out of the social sphere it exists in. It is not neutral because it is shaped by market forces (p. 39) and needs a skilled-enough user to operate it (p. 40). In order to work through the reductiveness of functionalism, Selber encourages using five parameters (p. 45): educational goals (meaning students can use computers for educational goals, p. 45), social conventions (meaning students understand that students must decode the social space expectations, p. 51), specialized discourses (a student must understand the appropriate language of a community to include the cultural privileges embedded in it, p. 55), management activities (a student needs to understand how to manage the large amount of information computers amass p. 61), and technological impasses (students' inabilities to traverse writing or communication problems (p. 67) such as computer anxiety and issues of race, class, and gender, p. 68).

In the case of computers, Selber describes functional literacy as imagining computers as tools, critical literacy as computers as cultural artifacts, and rhetorical literacy as meaning computers as hypertextual media (p. 25).

References:

Selber, S. (2004). Multiliteracies for a digital age. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.