Digital Literacy
According to the New London Group (1996) education’s “fundamental purpose is to ensure that all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community, and economic life” p.60. Basically education and therefore educators goal is to prepare students for every part of life after school. It would be hard to argue that today’s students do not need digital literacy skills to help them be prepared for their life now and their life after school. I very much agree with the contention that we need to broaden our definition of literacy to encompass digital or multiliteracies perspectives.
Thinking about the concept of digital literacy, I did feel like I had it more or less figured out. We spend a lot of time at my work sorting this out. In fact we speak mostly about digital fluencies because we do not think that being literate is enough. However, I am continuing to learn more and more about it, and to be exposed to more and more definitions of digital literacy. When I think about digital literacy, like any kind of literacy, I think of it more as a skill set. The Dobson and Willinsky’s (2009) reading however, seems to discus more what type of literacy qualifies has being digital, and how things have changed or not. Regardless of what is considered digital and what’s not, if it’s a big change from classic literacy or a gradual movement, or if it is invisible as was suggested (I am not sure that true), students still need to know how to navigate this digital world.
Personally, I do believe this is a skill set that we need to actively teach. Despite the claim that today’s students are “digital natives” and are quite capable of navigating this medium, I agree with Bayne and Ross (2007) that this view needs some re-thinking. While students may be great with apps like snapchat, social media and video games, that does not mean they are literate in everything digital. I have seen students struggle with simple internet searches on a daily basis. Students also seems to have a very hard time understanding the impact both positive and negative that their digital footprints can have on their lives long-term. On the other end of the scale, just because someone is new to technology (a digital immigrant) does not mean that they are useless in the medium. Like real immigrants, digital immigrants have to work hard to learn the culture and the language, it is certainly possible that they will come to understand it better than the natives. I know French (my second language) grammar rules much better than English ones.
The teacher still has a very important role to play (privileged or not) in teaching literacy of all kinds including the digital kind. I don’t think that putting a computer or a tablet in front of our students is enough. We have to expressly teach the educational and professional digital skills that we hope our students will walk away with.
References
Bayne, S., & Ross, J. (2007). The ‘digital native’ and ‘digital immigrant’: A dangerous opposition. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Society for Research into Higher Education, Brighton, UK.
Dobson & Willinsky. (2009). Digital Literacy. Cambridge Handbook of Literacy.
The New London Group. (1996) “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies:Designing Social Futures.” Harvard Educational Review 66(1), pp. 60-92.
I totally agree with this post as I have spent the past two years teaching grade fours how to do internet searches with increasing difficulty. Students today may have the experience with handheld devices and are able to navigate the app world, but they are not able to use a simple search engine. Our school has recently introduced a coding course which will teach a handful of students in each class how to code. I feel this is a great start but that eventually all students should learn this skill. I totally agree with your statement about teaching being the act of preparing students for real life, however, I sometimes feel our school systems do students disservice in this arena. Allowing students to hand in assignments up until the last day of class, with no due dates ever, is hardly real life. There are also colleagues who are against using technology such as phones in class (for good reason), except I feel they are a part of our everyday life and should be used in a productive manner if possible.
Since the concept of literacy itself goes beyond simply being able to read, the idea of digital literacy should go beyond simply being able to ‘use a computer’. I think the definition of digital literacy should go as follows, “the ability to understand and use information in multiple formats from a wide range of sources when it is presented via computers. (Casey & Bruce, 2010)
Thank you for a thoughtful post. You make some really great points here!
References:
Casey, L. (2010). Digital literacy in primary school site presentation 2010. Retrieved November 24, 2015, from http://www.slideshare.net/leocasey/digital-literacy-in-primary-school-site-presentation-2010
An interesting thought regarding the concept of Literacy as a whole is raised and what it means to understand the vocabulary of this medium. While the term digital literacy is often used, I’ve struggled with the term ‘literacy’ in terms of expressing the ideas underlying it. Unlike language literacy, the skills that encompass digital literacy are subject to the whims of technology. For example, 15 years ago there was no need to consider a social media profile. 9 years ago it was not necessary to understand the intricacies of expressing yourself effectively in 140 characters in Twitter. 5 years ago it was not necessary to be able to compose an interesting photo collection on Instagram. Inevitably, if literacy is to be associated with use of technology, collectively we will never catch up to the early adopters before the next wave of tools appears. By contrast the rules of English or French (for example) change very gradually over time and in many ways can be seen as absolutes that need to be learned once to effectively understand them and practice them. ‘Digital Literacy’ cannot be mastered the same way for the same duration. I’m in favour of changing this term from Digital Literacy to Technology Awareness. It just seems that the rules change far too frequently for the term literacy to be applied to this issue unless it can be established that a absolute set of parameters can be applied to Digital Literacy that won’t change in 5-10 years.
I suspect in 10 years we will be talking about the need to be able to communicate in combinations of images and 4 word sentences over clothing based software tools (just an extreme example) 🙂
Just my thoughts for now.
Maxim
You have addressed some interesting issues. I agree with your statement that we need to teach digital literacy skills to help prepare students for their life now and their life after school. Technology is changing so rapidly and is having a tremendous impact in our lives. It can be challenging as a teacher to provide students with adequate exposure to prepare them for what lies ahead. In all reality the students that we are teaching will likely have jobs in the future that don’t yet exist today. One of the growing fields is in the area of software and program designers.
According to Midhilia (2014), there is a rising demand for software and program designers. For students to take advantage of this growing professional field they will require skills in coding. Coding is the language of computers. Currently in Ontario, there is no common educational approach to teaching computer programming in schools. According to Resnick (as cited in Pierce, 2013), coding is an important part of being fluent in today society. In the same way that reading and writing provide us with opportunities, coding is a form of expression. Knowing that language allows us to move beyond being consumers of technology to being creators of technology.
Opportunities for young people to learn to read and write code are beginning to become more mainstream. School are begging to establish coding clubs for students. There are National events like the Hour of Code where students are encouraged to experiment with coding. There are also several easy to use interfaces that allow students to learn how to code (eg., Scratch, Girls who Code, etc…).
I think that Coding is an interesting example to reflect on when we think about digital literacies. A question that I struggle with is how we will go about teaching students the range or literacies in a way that will sufficiently prepare them for the future.
Thanks for sharing your post. I was a joy to read. If you are interested, here is a good TED Talk for Mitch Resnick, the creator of Scratch. https://www.ted.com/talks/mitch_resnick_let_s_teach_kids_to_code?language=en
References
Pierce, M. (2013). Coding for middle schoolers. Education Digest 19(2), 38-42. Retrieved from
http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=6e1b94d9-d7e9-4c5f-aa82-b6038dfa8b09%40sessionmgr110&vid=1&hid=115
Midhila, P. (2014). Scratch for indian educational system and localization. (Master’s thesis, Amrita Vishwa Vidhyapeetham University, Coimbatore, India). Retrieved fromhttp://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/myreport2014.pdf
I agree that simple familiarity in how to use Facebook and Mindcraft does not automatically translate into students all round digital literacy. I also agree that it is an important roll of the teacher to instruct digital literacy. This, of course, needs to be incorporated into all areas of the curriculum and teachers also need to ensure that digital devices are simply not replacing the pencil.
Currently I am working at a school that has just begun to integrate the BYOD program into the elementary school. Being a ‘technology junkie’ myself I have been greatly anticipating the day when a majority of my students have electronic devices throughout the whole day and I no longer have to rely on sharing a computer cart with seven other classes. The issue that I am concerned with is the teachers who are not as enthusiastic. (On my team there are a number of them). I can empathize with them as teachers have been told to instruct different reading and writing curriculums, along with “inquiry based math” coming to the forefront. Professional development has been focusing predominantly on the changes with literacy and math. Technological integration has been put on the ‘back-burner’ despite the immanent implementation of the BYOD program. Because of this many teachers would see technology integration as just ‘another struggle’ they must deal with in the classroom.
I fear without the emphasis that digital literacy is just as important as any other literacy, whether its language or numerical, that the digital push into the classrooms is going to struggle. In a sense many teachers will simply be providing students with “$1000 dollar pencils (November 2013).”
November, A. (2013, February 10). Why Schools Must Move Beyond One-to-One Computing. Retrieved December 2, 2015, from http://novemberlearning.com/educational-resources-for-educators/teaching-and-learning-articles/why-schools-must-move-beyond-one-to-one-computing/
I absolutely agree that teachers have a part to play in developing digital literacy, and that role continues on into adult education. On particular aspect of literacy that struck me during the readings was Willinsjy and Dobson’s “information literacy”(2009, p.18). Richard Lanham observed that “the word ‘literacy,’ meaning the ability to read and write, has gradually extended its grasp in the digital age until it has come to mean the ability to understand information, however presented” (1995). Information now comes to us in a wide variety of forms, and “[m]ultimedia literacy requires that we be very quick on our feet in moving from one kind of knowledge to another” (Lanham, 1995).
In the college classroom, where I often taught “digital natives,” I was surprised by the lack of information gathering skills, and particularly the lack of ability to discern between valid sources and spurious information. There was also little awareness of issues such a copyright – “if someone posts a picture online, it means I can use it” was a popular attitude. Part of that is the erosion of the divide between public and private, I think. Nevertheless, the concept of “ownership” of multimedia sources was scarce. I believe that information literacy need to be a large part of the skill-set taught to students. As colleagues here have already noted, digital literacy goes beyond being able to use devices. It must encompass students’ interaction with our multimedia world. We want them to be good citizens, and in my mind that includes good online citizenship.
Teaching students (of all ages) digital information literacy will promote “a greater understanding, providing them with search and reading strategies for navigating among sources and for dealing with related issues of source reliability, intellectual property, and access rights“ (Dobson and Willinsky, 2009, p.19).
References
Dobson, T. & Willinsky, J. (2009). Digital Literacy. Retrieved from http://pkp.sfu.ca/files/Digital%20Literacy.pdf
Lanham, R. (1995) Digital Literacy. Retrieved from http://www2.idehist.uu.se/distans/ilmh/Ren/lanham-digital-lit.htm