Metaliteracy for the metamodern world

How lucky I have been to serve as a librarian and “literacy specialist” during the time when literacy was turned upside down. (Well, there were a few bumpy moments when I didn’t really feel lucky!) I got to witness it personally and globally. I remember a day in the school library, when I had the strangest sensation (somewhere in the early days after the turn of the century) that the floor of the library was shaking. I realized I was experiencing the shift from primarily print materials to digital ones at the close of the Gutenberg Parentheses.

My search for ways to adapt and teach literacy in our postmodern and metamodern times led me to metaliteracy, a term coined by Mackey and Jacobson that provides a structure for the acquisition, production, and sharing of knowledge in collaborative online communities. I have used several other literacy terms (such as transliteracy) over the past few years, but metaliteracy seems to perfectly match our digital-based literacy environment.

I took a break from blogging to write a book on the topic of metaliteracy that should be published this year. My research has led me to the intersection of literacy and our philosophical moment in time– metamodernism. Of course, this proposed name has not yet become widely accepted since it is impossible to understand an era or a place in history at the time it is being lived. Yet, the sense of feeling that times have changed and that postmodernism is over surrounds us all.

Thomas P. Mackey and Trudi E. Jacobson.  Metaliteracy: Reinventing Information Literacy to Empower Learners. Chicago: Neal-Schuman/ALA Editions and London; Facet, 2014.