Awareness Diseases. Special Interest. Menu National Today. Log in Sign up. When is International Literacy Day ? History of International Literacy Day Although much progress has been made in improving literacy rates in the more than fifty years since the first International Literacy Day, illiteracy remains a global problem.
International Literacy Day timeline. Traditions of the Day Literacy is a blessing often taken for granted. Why is International Literacy Day celebrated? Who is the founder of International Literacy Day? International Literacy Day Activities Donate books to local classrooms Elementary school classroom libraries always need fresh reading material to keep young students interested in reading. Gift a book Children are naturally curious about the world around them.
Start a community lending library Gather family, friends, or neighbors together today and start a small lending library in your neighborhood. Community participation The lack of literary skills limits social engagement at all age levels and prevents adults and children from being able to participate fully and contribute to the betterment of society.
Effective Communication Learning to read and write improves our ability to communicate effectively with others by enhancing oral language, allowing us to express our feelings, thoughts, and ideas with others more clearly. Employment Advancement Knowing how to read, write and work with numbers are critical skills for jobs with opportunities to advance up the social-economic ladder. Knowledge is Power Literacy is the key to personal empowerment and gives us personal dignity and self-worth.
We are grateful Just thinking about how different our lives would be if we could not read or write makes us shiver. Illiteracy is a problem that can be overcome Some problems appear to be so big and overwhelming they seem almost impossible to solve. International Literacy Day related holidays Tue Aug 9. Yes, c. Now most literate people could read silently with ease, and Caeser was no longer special!
After the impressive progression of written language, you may think that nothing could make reading any easier than spaces between words. For centuries, many people would have agreed with you. However, the last major invention is thought to be one of the most important inventions of modern times; the printing press. It was a long and expensive process to get a book, as they still had to be handwritten. Errors were plentiful in books; therefore, there were atrocious errors within the fields of science, medicine, mathematics, and history.
The printing press brought forth movable type and easy and affordable access to mass book production. Book production flourished, and with it an increase in literacy. Europeans craved knowledge, and with accessible books, their knowledge was consistent and reliable.
For the first time in human history, the masses were able to rapidly spread their ideas through the written word. Readers flocked to writing that was previously unavailable to them, such as travel books!
He brought Canadian film educators to the seminary to acquaint his colleagues with their techniques for developing film literacy. One day McLuhan phoned him there to say he was just down the road at Brandeis University to give a lecture It was a fortuitous meeting. Culkin became a renowned and excellent interpreter of McLuhan's thoughts and work, writing important early articles about the media shift in The Saturday Review.
McLuhan in turn, appointed Culkin a fellow at the University of Toronto's Centre for Culture and Technology and proudly announced in correspondence with a colleague " I obtained the services of John Culkin, the film Jesuit, who is known throughout the world among film-makers and teachers.
Culkin became a renowned and excellent interpreter of McLuhan's thoughts and work. McLuhan moved to Fordham and his newly-published book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man , formed the basis for all of their work. At Fordham, Father Culkin created methods for learning and teaching how to use television, film and photography as "objects of study" and combine them with more traditional subjects in the humanities, English literature, and the arts.
In , the tall, blond priest left both the priesthood and Fordham and founded the Center for Understanding Media, Inc. The mission of the Center was to teach teachers how to understand all forms of media including print, theater, and the newer electronic forms such as film and television.
Understanding media was the Center's sole objective and, as such, it was the first organization in the United States with that exclusive purpose. The work of the Center for Understanding Media was carried out through various projects including:. This post coupled with your video on YouTube supposedly provides an in-depth and comprehensible insight of the advent of writing. I am impressed with how our ancestors had undergone a lot of hardship and managed to create a range of scripts that are still accessible up to now, the whole process would require much patience, resilience and sacrifice.
I am grateful that these days, in spite of our different cultural backgrounds, we do have different scripts in common, eventually universal scripts that can be used to write any language. Overall, your lecture and tutoring is of great value to me since I can have more understanding about the history of our language, specifically our writing systems.
Thanks Dr. Ingrid for sharing these interesting blogs. In fact, I would like to share some information about the appearance and development of my native language, Vietnamese language. However, I also read comments below your blogs, I saw that another your student has already shared it. Thus, I comment differently. Thanks to these blogs, I get precious knowledge about the appearance and development of writing systems through thousands of years ago.
They have been invented, improved, and developed by different periods of time and associated by the people who invented them. When I read these, there are key words or phrases they seem new to me that encourage me to find out more related information. By doing that, this helps me gain and discover more knowledge not only the appearance of writing systems but also their history, history of ancient people or our ancestor such as Sumerians, Ancient Egypt people and Chinese people.
It is amazing how ancestors invented and developed writing systems although not all ancient writing systems might not be existed and studied until now. Thank you so much, Jenny, for appreciating the blog! Also, the reading makes me admire the effort of the inventors of writing systems because it must be a complicated process to transform the spoken words to the systems which represent the meaning of those spoken words.
Without the writing system, the world would have been very messy and chaotic as the population is growing. Thus, the writing systems seem like a very essential tool to reduce some social problems. Thank you, Vatnak! By making the world less chaotic here, I just want to refer to the important contract which can be the valid evidence if any problems happen. But, yeah, you make me start thinking of a bigger picture of writing systems as some writing may confuse to people.
Can anyone? Presentation across written, spoken, and digital formats have changed drastically across time. Especially when compared to thousands of years ago e. Each medium has changed across time and varies in limitations i. Thanks, D. The covid pandemic has really brought those inequalities in access to the fore. Have a look at the blog post we published yesterday about the use of old and new media in public health communication in Cameroon.
Hi Ingrid and Classmates. First of all Ingrid I would also like to thank you for very cohesive, well organized presentations using many aspects of multimedia. I am enjoying our lessons and am learning much about how to be a better teacher. I really appreciate how the lessons are embedded within the context of history and culture which I find very fascinating and much more interesting to understand. I have always been fascinated by reading and time travel so I love the concept that the written word is a time machine where we can speak to the past or future and how paper and printing revolutionized our world or rather many small parts of the world, at the same time.
The fact that the evolution of writing has been looked at from such a western enthocentric perspective is such a shame but perhaps with this awareness and many linguistic researchers emerging from non-western backgrounds this is and will continue to correct over time. The very important role that have books have played as the holder of knowledge in history and how those in power have sought to control that knowledge and the current narrative, is also interesting.
People often say history is written by the victors. For example, how the Nazis sought to collect, burn and destroy Jewish books and how books by healers who people thought of as witches, would be burned as a way of the conquering force asserting dominance by controlling the knowledge accessible to people. I find it very inspiring, the many ways writing has emerged, in different forms, in different parts of the world and interesting that many languages are very much alive and still in a process of evolving.
Thanks, Ally! You are right — to control writing is to control minds …. I like your image of an Excel spreadsheet — unromantic, but very useful!
Hi Ingrid, thanks for your interesting lecture. It is fascinating to know how writing was invented. My mother tongue is Vietnamese. The Vietnamese writing system uses the Latin script based on Romance languages. Vietnamese was formerly written with Hanzi or Chinese Characters. These are called chu nom. The problem was that people still had to learn Chinese first if they wanted to become literate. So the average people lived their lives in a state of illiteracy or semi-literacy for most of recorded Vietnamese history.
In the 17th century, in an effort to ease pedagogy, the Catholics developed Quoc Ngu, a romanization of Vietnamese. Thanks, Audrey! This lecture was fascinating. How languages are interconnected through writing is really interesting. Different cultures and perspectives that has led to creation of a system appropriate to a group of people and how we decode them today for better understanding their stories, all are absolutely interesting.
Another point that has caught my attention was destruction of other writing systems, as we see today, by using power. Today writing system and language of many minority groups around the world are being threatened to wipe out and neglected by powerful countries that promote languages which they believe is politically beneficial for various reasons. Thank you for the lecture. Thanks, Soudeh! One of the key lessons of the study of literacies is that we can never ignore the relationship between language and power ….
Hi Ingrid! We are so fortunate to inherit such a fortune, such a gift from our ancestors. And there is no doubt about the importance of writing, the most visualized example of the vital role of writing i tell myself a little bit mocking and funny is that i would be so fool if there were no writing, no literacy, no schooling.
Furthermore, this blog is very informative in such a way helping me know more how the writing was created, it was not just simple as what we are using nowadays. Such a long time with the human revolution, the writing in many languages are perfect as they are. And the hard work of transmitting from oral form to written form, i share similar reflection with the time i went to Australian National Museum and Gallery, looked at the paintings and the writing of the Aboriginals, tried to understand what they mean.
And i got stuck every time i look at the painting, and i realised how hard the invention of writing would be. I mean, the process of working from oral form to visual form such as paiting and writing as it is in some languages chinese for instance , or in the first idea of writing of our ancestors, these processes share similar sense of how to figure it out.
Hi Ingrid I loved the way the week 2 lecture was embedded in so much history — I think it highlights the really interdisciplinary nature of linguistics. I found the issue of colonialism and how this has limited our knowledge of writing very interesting. Thanks, Monica! Ultimately, language sits at the heart of everything humans do. Thank you very much for this interesting topic, I end up with this article my mind was load with a lot of important information that I know them for the first time.
It is interesting to see how the writing was an important way of human connection in a way or another. In addition, they first were just 22 letters, then they increased to 28 Arabic alphabets! Thank you Ingrid very much. Thanks, Arakah! Another fun fact about Phoenician and Arabic is that abjabs are perfectly suited to write these languages where so much word formation goes back to consonantal root words. This week has definitely inspired awe!
What I find most intriguing is that writing was not only invented but it was invented independently at least three times. The fact that we are not sure about this is quite amazing in itself! It is a sad fact of history that those who seek power and to rule others, have little regard for the cultures of those they overpower.
When it comes to the destruction of writing systems such as the Spanish destroying Mayan script, we can see too however, the inherent power of literacy as conquerors feel they must strip their new subjects of it. Thanks for the interesting lesson! Thanks, Peter! You are right that those in power have always feared the education of their subjects, and have tried to limit it in various ways, even if not always as blatantly as in the example.
Hi Ingrid and everyone, Thank you for the interesting lecture. It is hard to imagine our current life without writing. We are so lucky to have everything ready use and did not realize importance of the existence of it. Our ancestors were so smart and it is always fascinating to know originality and transformation. Your lecture reminds me of a famous old movie in my country.
For example, he symbolizes squire as a mare and if there is a dot inside the squire it is a pregnant mare if the dot is next to the squire it means mare with foal etc.
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