Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Bridge the Text and tech literacy gap between generations - case study of reading programs from public libraries in Guangdong Province of China #wlic2013

The second session which was co-organised by the Information Literacy section, this time with the Reading and Literacy group at the IFLA World library and Information Conference in Singapore was on Intergenerational literacies: Texto-techno.
Bridge the Text and tech literacy gap between generations - case study of reading programs from public libraries in Guangdong Province of China was from Huang QunChing (coauthored with Liu Honghui) (Sun Yat-sen Library of Guangdong Province, Guangzhou, China) The full paper is at http://library.ifla.org/151/
She identified a gap between young generations using screens and older comfortable with print in China. She talked about self-service libraries at places like stations ("elders like to stand by and learn: they name these machines Book ATMs") and the speaker also identified self issue terminals as places of text-techno communication (the young chiild touches the screen, the adult reads the text and says where to touch - this is in the slide I show above). She mentioned computer classes for elders (one satisfied participant wrote a poem!) News, search, WeChat, stocks, ephotos, games and microblogging were among things elders enjoyed doing.
Thery also do activities for teens' text literacy. An example is a composition competition in each summer vacation, another is a calligraphy onsite game started in 2012 which also can stimulate people who came to watch. "I tell the stories in books" started in 2007 and is a performance competition which stimulates reading. The Guangzhou Memories Cartoons database started in 2009 and is a popular way for teens to learn about their traditional culture.

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