Digital Literacy Skills – Who’s Teaching Them?
Whilst reading Bolter’s Chapter 3, “Hypertext and the remediation of print,” the notion of digital literacy sparked my interest. More specifically, the explicit topics of link jumping and visual literacy.
My first big question is, are we teaching link jumping as a valid form of digital literacy? There is a required skillset to link jumping vs. reading a website top to bottom. When do children process which of the two is appropriate and when? Surely one could argue that, naturally, this is decipherable depending on how the page is written. Where I grow concerned, is whose responsibility is it to educate these children as to how to direct their focus? Are they to learn solely by assimilation? Currently, we’re saying yes. When is it appropriate to read the whole article vs. jump from one page to the next? How do we self-monitor when we are not reading the original content that we originally set out to? If some adults can barely self-monitor, then this should be very telling as to how appropriate the need for this skill is. Jeff Utecht (follow this guy), affirms this very notion in his closing talks (https://youtu.be/1Ykvz4PKeH8) at the recent Learning 2.015 Conference in Manila this year (which I was fortunate enough to attend).
In the age where knowledge is so easily accessible at our finger tips, are schools explicitly teaching search skills such as these made by Hack College (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsFqY9a_m-Y)? In addition, think of how overlooked, misused, and underutilized the power of the Omnibox is. Everything from speech based typing, dividing a tip, deciding which vegetable is more nutritious, or entering calendar events by voice can all be synergized from this one, magical, digital text (or voice) place holder available across a broad range of digital mediums. With more and more put on ourselves, and our students, shouldn’t technology by making our lives more simplified? With more material and resources to sift through online, it’s essential that we teach these “hacks” or productivity skills to our students.
Furthermore, I feel another largely overlooked component of digital literacy in today’s age is that of digital visual literacy skills. For example, who is teaching children the art of graphic design and concepts like C.A.R.P. (http://www.coetail.com/traintheteacher/2015/10/16/teaching-design-principles-to-8-year-olds/ – particularly look at the last infographic image)? Note that this resource is from COETAIL, another amazing program that Jeff Utecht (mentioned above) has his hands in running and developing towards the professional development of educators in technology. With education’s shift on digital portfolios, student blogging, iBooks Author, websites, and so much creation of digital work, who is modeling what it all should look like from a digital presentation perspective? Surely not some teachers I know! Hands up if you’ve been killed by text in a slide ware presentation lately, or at the very least, were presented text that was hard on your eyes from a size or color standpoint? Are students aware of complimenting fonts (check out Adobe CC’s iOS app)? Do they know what fonts naturally compliment each other (check out http://www.typegenius.com)? I’m a grade three teacher, am not perfect, do struggle with more and more learning objectives, yet, I do find the time. Like all blended learning, don’t teach these skills explicitly, but embed them as part of learning through assigned work and scaffold their skillets throughout the year.
Thanks for the post. It found that I connected with a lot of the observations that you made in your post. More specifically, the question of who is responsible for teaching students digital literacy skills. I am also a primary teacher and there are often moments at Pro-D days where teachers talk about the ways to engage students in technological learning opportunities. These suggestions can become increasingly overwhelming as we are tasked with teaching more components. I think that your suggestions that teachers should “embed them as part of learning through assigned work and scaffold their skills throughout the year“ is one way to provide students with meaningful learning opportunities and is also best practice as students begin to use these skills in real tasks. Early primary teachers are often reluctant to utilize technology and teach digital literacy or digital citizenship. Instead, there is a focus on print literacy. Indeed, print literacy is often less distracting for young students and allows them to manipulate the book much more easily. On the other hand, I also believe that students should have an opportunity to access these digital learning environments. If they have a strong foundation from a young age, they are more likely to be comfortable with the digital learning environments and will be able to navigate these pages with little difficulty. In the end, I think it is about striking a balance and helping students find arenas to use their skills. Even in primary, students need to understand that the online learning arena provides many opportunities for learning and they require support in learning how to negotiate these environments appropriately.
Your post “Digital Literacy Skills – Who’s Teaching Them” really resonated with me. The topic of digital literacy has come up at numerous staff meets and district technology meetings that I take part in. I know that there are many teachers within my school and district that are still grappling with the idea of what digital literacy is, they haven’t gotten to the point of questioning how we teach it. Regardless of how we define digital literacy or how we feel it is best to teach it the reality is that kids need to be digitally literate. Kids have access to way more information than ever before. This is good because they theoretically have access to better and more accurate information than they have in the past, yet at the same time the negative aspect is that students need to sift through heaps of digital manure before they access the correct information.
You mentioned the idea of link jumping and students needing to self monitor as they are searching for information online. This is something that I sometimes still have a hard time doing, when a website seems to be promising, but in the end isn’t. I think that teaching self monitoring is a very challenging task. I think one way to start is by teaching students scanning skills. If they can effectively scan for information, then they will be able to decide much quicker if they should jump to the next link or invest more time on the site they are on.
Personally, I am like you, I use blended learning with my middle school students. As with most skills, learning a particular skill in isolation makes them useless. By showing students how to navigate and search for information within the confines of a relevant assignment is the way to go in my opinion.
Hi Justin:
Thanks for your post – it gave me pause for thought about what and how we teach.
The process of meaning construction has been significantly altered in the electronic galaxy. Simply from exposure, students have already gained skills (through assimilation, as you suggest) specific to reading in a hypertext environment. However, it would be irresponsible of us in the field of education to ignore this – students need real skill development in this area to be successful in their future endeavors. They have to read and engage differently – and be reflective and critical at the same time. We must incorporate opportunities for them to hone this ability.
From my experience, students yearn for some sense of control over their learning. Placing a mouse and technology at their fingertips gives them the autonomy to control their environment. They become energized and motivated. They have power over what and how they read. This alone is good reason for adding this dimension to the curriculum.
Further enhancing the experience, the readers now have the affordance to become contributors and authors of the environment which puts a unique spin on meaning construction (Patterson, 2000). And if that is not enough, Snyder asserts that computers shape the way we think and organize our ideas (as cited in Patterson, 2000). Our writing space (Bolter, 2001) becomes increasingly nonlinear and collaborative.
Patterson (2000) suggests one of the best ways to address this in the classroom would be to have students write hypertextually themselves. Sharing amongst each other, allowing for reflection and comments would be the first step in setting the stage for skill development. In this way, reader and author can dialogue in the same way that this interaction can occur on the internet. As Ong’s (1982) “secondary orality” theory suggests, this might allow for a participatory sense of community and focus on the present moment as exists for oral cultures.
The real challenge for instructors and educational authorities is to decide on what can be sacrificed in the curriculum in order to accommodate the time it takes for developing this skill in learners.
Bolter, Jay David. (2001). Writing spaces: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print [2nd edition]. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Ong, Walter (1982) Orality and Literacy. New York, NY: Routledge.
Patterson, N. (2000). Hypertext and the Changing Roles of Readers. English Journal: National Council of Teachers of English (November). 74-80. Retrieved from: http://homepages.gac.edu/~mkoomen/edu241/hypertext.pdf
Thanks so much for your post! It was quite interesting and you gave several specific examples, some of which I had not thought about yet. You gave me lots to think about.
In terms of your opening question my first thought was that we are in fact teaching digital literacy at the high school where I work. I have mentioned before that my school has a digital focus and we are in our third year of phasing in a program where every student has their own device and a large portion of their work is done using technology. As part of this initiative all of our students have their own blogs and are encouraged to post their work online. For the first time this year we have all of our grade 9 students taking a digital literacy course (while they take it in grade 9 it is a grade 10 course, so it counts towards graduation credits). It is an online course, so it takes up no time in their time table, but because it’s run through our school they work on bits and pieces of it in all of their academic classes. All of their work in this course is to be posted on their blog. We are only two months into this new class, so it is hard to say how successful it will be, but this is our current attempt at teaching digital literacy. In terms of a model for how we view digital literacy we have been using the 21st century fluencies – https://globaldigitalcitizen.org/21st-century-fluencies and we actually refer to digital fluencies and not digital literacy (here is a simple explanation of the differences – http://www.socialens.com/blog/2011/02/05/the-difference-between-digital-literacy-and-digital-fluency/).
My second thought was about who should be teaching digital literacy. While I do think we have an important role to play in high school, we certainly cannot wait until grade 9 to start building these skills in young people. I feel like these lessons need to start at home and be incorporated into all levels of education.