Is this a good thing? Does not redefining the word literacy to cover more topics merely lose us specifity? What's gained by redefining “literacy” as something wider than reading and writing?
For centuries there have been ways for making sense of the world that are more than merely the ability to read and write. For example, maps (useful for navigation), technical drawings (used by engineers), the conventions of mathematics (eg what the equal sign means), the command of speech-making skills or oratory, the scientific method. I think all of these are very valuable, but I don't see what is gained by redefining literacy to include all of them and anything else you can think up.

And I have some doubts about some of the claims, for example you quote Kress in 1998 as saying “The problem is that, until recently, ‘visualisation [was] seen as an unproblematic kind of ‘translation’ from one semiotic mode into another – as a simplistic kind of translation from one language to another’ “

Kress doesn't say who was seing this as an unproblematic kind of translation, but this view was certainly not true of specialists in graphic design. I took a high school exam in technical drawing in NZ in 1992 and the course had been offered for decades. My engineering university programme included as a compulsory course more technical drawing, and particularly good examples of visulisation have been admired for decades – for example the first diagrammatic map of the London Underground (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_map). And I note that Harry Beck drew on previous mapping experience. If all of society regarded visualisation as unproblematic, why so much emphasis on teaching it, and on teaching it in university engineering schools?
Of course there may have been people in society who regarded it as unproblematic, and it may be that those people are the ones who Kress was referring to. But when it comes to *anything* in education you can always find someone in society who thinks it's dead simple, either because they are a natural at it or because they don't know anything at all about it. Merely referring to the uninformed doesn't tell us much about society.

And I am curious about the comment by Tyner that visual literacy shouldn't be separated from information literacy or media literacy. Does he provide in his report more detailed explanations of why he thinks this is so? In high school my English teachers were supposed to teach us visual literacy, but the gap between their knowledge and the feedback they could provide and that that my graphic design teacher was providing was vast. For example the graphic design teacher could list all the different distortions introduced by various projections onto paper, and expected us to be able to identify them to, the English teachers never even used the word projection. How does Tyner address this?

Is this a good thing? Does not redefining the word literacy to cover more topics merely lose us specifity? What's gained by redefining “literacy” as something wider than reading and writing?
For centuries there have been ways for making sense of the world that are more than merely the ability to read and write. For example, maps (useful for navigation), technical drawings (used by engineers), the conventions of mathematics (eg what the equal sign means), the command of speech-making skills or oratory, the scientific method. I think all of these are very valuable, but I don't see what is gained by redefining literacy to include all of them and anything else you can think up.

And I have some doubts about some of the claims, for example you quote Kress in 1998 as saying “The problem is that, until recently, ‘visualisation [was] seen as an unproblematic kind of ‘translation’ from one semiotic mode into another – as a simplistic kind of translation from one language to another’ “

Kress doesn't say who was seing this as an unproblematic kind of translation, but this view was certainly not true of specialists in graphic design. I took a high school exam in technical drawing in NZ in 1992 and the course had been offered for decades. My engineering university programme included as a compulsory course more technical drawing, and particularly good examples of visulisation have been admired for decades – for example the first diagrammatic map of the London Underground (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_map). And I note that Harry Beck drew on previous mapping experience. If all of society regarded visualisation as unproblematic, why so much emphasis on teaching it, and on teaching it in university engineering schools?
Of course there may have been people in society who regarded it as unproblematic, and it may be that those people are the ones who Kress was referring to. But when it comes to *anything* in education you can always find someone in society who thinks it's dead simple, either because they are a natural at it or because they don't know anything at all about it. Merely referring to the uninformed doesn't tell us much about society.

And I am curious about the comment by Tyner that visual literacy shouldn't be separated from information literacy or media literacy. Does he provide in his report more detailed explanations of why he thinks this is so? In high school my English teachers were supposed to teach us visual literacy, but the gap between their knowledge and the feedback they could provide and that that my graphic design teacher was providing was vast. For example the graphic design teacher could list all the different distortions introduced by various projections onto paper, and expected us to be able to identify them to, the English teachers never even used the word projection. How does Tyner address this?

Is this a good thing? Does not redefining the word literacy to cover more topics merely lose us specifity? What's gained by redefining “literacy” as something wider than reading and writing?
For centuries there have been ways for making sense of the world that are more than merely the ability to read and write. For example, maps (useful for navigation), technical drawings (used by engineers), the conventions of mathematics (eg what the equal sign means), the command of speech-making skills or oratory, the scientific method. I think all of these are very valuable, but I don't see what is gained by redefining literacy to include all of them and anything else you can think up.

And I have some doubts about some of the claims, for example you quote Kress in 1998 as saying “The problem is that, until recently, ‘visualisation [was] seen as an unproblematic kind of ‘translation’ from one semiotic mode into another – as a simplistic kind of translation from one language to another’ “

Kress doesn't say who was seing this as an unproblematic kind of translation, but this view was certainly not true of specialists in graphic design. I took a high school exam in technical drawing in NZ in 1992 and the course had been offered for decades. My engineering university programme included as a compulsory course more technical drawing, and particularly good examples of visulisation have been admired for decades – for example the first diagrammatic map of the London Underground (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_map). And I note that Harry Beck drew on previous mapping experience. If all of society regarded visualisation as unproblematic, why so much emphasis on teaching it, and on teaching it in university engineering schools?
Of course there may have been people in society who regarded it as unproblematic, and it may be that those people are the ones who Kress was referring to. But when it comes to *anything* in education you can always find someone in society who thinks it's dead simple, either because they are a natural at it or because they don't know anything at all about it. Merely referring to the uninformed doesn't tell us much about society.

And I am curious about the comment by Tyner that visual literacy shouldn't be separated from information literacy or media literacy. Does he provide in his report more detailed explanations of why he thinks this is so? In high school my English teachers were supposed to teach us visual literacy, but the gap between their knowledge and the feedback they could provide and that that my graphic design teacher was providing was vast. For example the graphic design teacher could list all the different distortions introduced by various projections onto paper, and expected us to be able to identify them to, the English teachers never even used the word projection. How does Tyner address this?

I think the problem is that there *is* a 'fundamental' out there, but that we're referring to it in derivative terms. I don't actually think that 'digital literacy' is a good descriptor and that we'll probably come to call it something different. Exactly what is kind of the point of my whole thesis!

As for the avatar, you must have interacted with http://disqus.com at some point, which powers this blog. Why, is that not you?