Vacation Literacy...

I have a confession...when I want to be distracted from working on assignments and allow my mind to wander I go on virtual vacations. Today I was working on a final paper and as usually after a few hours of working I found my fingers twitching for Expedia.

Today while browsing through my dear friend Travelosity I felt as if my mind had been taken over by literacy. Perhaps it was just my guilty conscious for having a wandering mind during crunch time; however, everywhere I looked, I saw literacy.

   Today on travelocity I saw my escape as a Literacy Tool. This interactive vacation portal was the perfect opportunity to encourage literacy in our students. Users are encouraged to make choices, consider alternatives and make selections based on outlined criteria. Students struggling with literacy can use a model similar to a vacation website as a tool for learning.

I never before realized the extent of literacy required to navigate such a site. For example you need to know your city, your dates and all your travel factors. However, in addition, you must be able to make an informed decision. You must have both the digital skills to work the portal, and in addition the prior knowledge to be able to evaluate vacation offers and select the best deal.

For fun, I played a game with myself I selected a non-latin based language for which I have no point of reference and attempted to navigate the website. I wanted to see if my digital literacy and my knowledge of travel websites layouts/designs would be enough of a factor to see if I could figure out how to "get home" without having physical literacy or language skills.

Here is a Screen Capture from Expedia.kr or the Korean Version of Expedia. The first thing you will notice is that the prices are all different they use Korean Currency as opposed to the American or Canadian Dollar. I also found that i struggled with trying to select just flight and my particular travel options. I will tell you having general knowledge and the ability to navigate a travel website was an important skill however it was hard! I take advantage of how easily I can use both my language and digital skills to just find what I want to find with relative ease.

Chaning the language and format was a huge change for me. The first element I looked for was elements of similarity that I had seen before. I immediately recognized the universality of numbers and date formats. From there I was able to type in my travel dates and number of passangers. Something I was not counting on was changes in website format for cultural differences. Not all countries read left to right and not everyone places their fillable fields in the same order. I found I was trying to discover everything as I went by using former knowledge and critical thinking skills. Digital literacy meant a lot to me in this situation becuase without that knowledge I would have been completely lost.

I learned as I went and what I gained most from the experience was empathy and a new appreciation of what a new literacy learner is facing.