Posts Tagged ‘Digital literacy’

« Older Entries

The three tiers of digital literacy

May 7, 2010

I find that a lot of people get confused over what it means to be ‘digitally literate’. Many older users interpret younger people’s facility or confidence in using ICT as an indication that the latter know exactly what they’re doing in the online environment. After all, they’re pretty zippy in there, right? And gosh-darn aren’t they clever ‘cos they can program a VCR? (I can’t even begin to tell you what’s wrong with this notion.)

Of course, watching a 13 year-old flitt around MySpace can be intimidating for someone who doesn’t know where to click, but that doesn’t mean that the 13 year-old fully understands all they need to in order to be digitally literate. So, let’s break this down a bit. I’d offer three main strands to digital literacy in the current era:

  1. Functional digital literacy. In the age of Web 2.0, that doesn’t mean knowing how to hard code, or how to program, or how to write javascript — I don’t need to know what’s under the bonnet in order to drive the car. Instead, it means knowing how to sign up for a service and what happens after that; it means knowing how to find and add and invite friends; it means knowing how to upload a profile photo, etc., etc. Many kids have this kind of literacy, no doubt — the facility with the technology to know where to click.
  2. Network digital literacy. Understanding what it means to be a networked citizen. That means knowing how to manage your profiles and identities online; knowing what happens to the material you upload; knowing about data management and understanding boyd’s four properties of networked publics, i.e., 1) persistence, 2) searchability, 3) replicability, and 4) invisible audiences. It also means risk management and knowing how to read and interpret Terms of Service and Privacy policies. Do most people (young or old) know what it means when Facebook asks for a “transferable, sub-licensable” license to their IP? No.
  3. Critical digital literacy. This is perhaps the most crucial of the three, especially if we’re talking about how to use ICT to further cognition and to advance what Pierre Lévy refers to as collective intelligence. Critical digital literacy is about how to find, validate, interpret, communicate, analyse, critique, evaluate, synthesise, transform information and how to then use those skills in the participatory realm. It’s about higher-level thinking and engagement with cultural, social, political and intellectual life. In other words, it’s the big stuff.

What I’m saying is, don’t freak out when you think you’re being left behind because the kids are oh-so-clevva and teched up. Chances are you’ve already got the higher-order, intellectual skills you need to become a fully-rounded digital citizen. This in itself means that your network literacy should come along very quickly. And as for your functional literacy, well, just jump in there and play around a bit — you can’t break it ;)

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in Opinion | Leave a Comment »

‘Doubt’ movie trailer remix by meg

October 4, 2009

A couple of weeks ago, I watched the movie ‘Doubt,’ starring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffmann. The IMDB summary for the film reads,

“Set in 1964, Doubt centers on a nun who confronts a priest after suspecting him of abusing a black student. He denies the charges, and much of the play’s quick-fire dialogue tackles themes of religion, morality, and authority.”

Great film, a proper morality play. What I also loved about it was the way it commented on new technologies and the changing times. So I thought I’d do a remix along the lines of a movie trailer, as seems to be all the rage (check out Scary Mary Poppins … it’s a cack!). Here’s the radio edit … I made a dance mix too, but I prefer the shorter version, myself :) . Hope you like it. I think it’s kinda fun!

Tags:, , , , , ,
Posted in Digital literacy, Education politics, Opinion, Technology | 3 Comments »

Opinion: Remembering and other forms of knowing

October 23, 2008

One thing that strikes me as I teach people about moving around the web is how much we privilege remembering over other forms of knowing.

This has gotten me thinking about types of knowledge and how and why we value them, and how they link to remembering as a form of knowing. So, I’ve done a short analysis of what I think is going on as a way of explaining why this privileging might occur.

Let’s start with three common forms of knowledge — declarative, procedural and conditional — and take them apart a bit.

Here’s a basic representation:

Declarative Procedural Conditional
Knowledge about What How Why
Cognitive form
 Memory Remembering Understanding
Products Facts, information, descriptions, principles Actions,* skills, performance, know-how, things, doing Thought, thinking, consideration,
evaluation, innovation
Process Contextual Concrete, observable Abstract
What is evaluated
 Recollection Circumstance Concepts

In my observation and experience, most Aussies rank ‘knowing how’ at the top of a hierarchy of knowing. This isn’t really surprising, as ‘knowing how’ to do stuff is of great value to us: we see ourselves as practical people, as people who can fix things, as people who are problem-solvers with a can-do attitude. And ‘knowing how‘ to do stuff means all those things I’ve pulled out in the above table: remembering steps, using skills to complete a task, and producing a measurable, observable performance that evaluates circumstances.

A further, more general, explanation could also be that procedural knowledge is perceived by most people as the most imperative and useful for web purposes: “I just need to know how to make it work, before I gather too much information about what it is and the principles that underlie its function, and before I think about why I might want to use it.”

‘Knowing how’ to do stuff is thus seen as a right and good thing, and therefore something that is assigned a price above that given to the declarative and conditional ways of knowing.

But it is the cognitive form of remembering that is of interest to me in this post, because when people ask me about their web travails, “How do I do X?” and I respond, “I don’t remember … I know that you can do it, though, just let me have a quick look,” I’m often challenging their assumptions about the primacy of procedural knowledge. And giving a declarative answer to a procedural question makes many people uncomfortable because, as I’m arguing here, the ‘doing’ of a thing is valued more highly than is either understanding why you might do it, or having facts about it in the first place.

It’s also surely the case that ‘doing stuff’ tends to yield more tangible and measurable products (which are relatively easy to evaluate) than does thinking about stuff or identifying principles (which are harder to evaluate). Which is not to say that ‘knowing how’ is unimportant or irrelevant in. But it is to say that an approach to knowledge that privileges one form of knowing over others prevents us from bringing together all the ways of knowing into an attitude that could, quite frankly, help us learn quicker and more deeply, no matter the context.

____________________

*Here I’m thinking of ‘actions’ along the lines of Aristotle’s praxis.

Bookmark and Share

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Digital literacy, Learning online, Opinion | Leave a Comment »

Opinion: Rethink your ideas about tech support

September 25, 2008

Target Image

One not-so-minor assignment I’ve set myself at present is to change teachers’ thinking about tech support. Just a small thing, then.

It’s true that in the past — with clunky, difficult Web 1.0 technologies — we’ve had to rely on techies to do some proper hard-core stuff for us, such as fixing bugs in software or resetting webpages that we’ve managed to bugger up, or dealing with server issues. But now, with the much more stable and reliable technologies of Web 2.0, we no longer need someone hanging off the end of a phone, dealing with the numerous problems we’ve created for ourselves.

The reason is that Web 2.0′s software-as-service (i.e., online applications such as wikis, blogs and social networks) is pretty much bulletproof: you can’t break this stuff as you could break stuff in the old days of Web One. Which in turn means we have much less need of a help desk staffed by a real-live human person, just in case.

The point is this: once you are in the world of Web 2.0, you have to shift the model of support that you’ve got in your head. Help in WebTwoLand comes in the form of googling solutions for yourself, checking out FAQs, and trawling the web to find the geek who has already solved your problem for you and kindly posted a solution in a discussion forum.

Forget phoning the help desk. Forget The Manual. Forget, even, pressing F1 (always a trepidatious proposition to start with!). Instead, search YouTube and find a video tutorial or visit a how-to site (there’s plenty of them out there). You can help yourself in this environment simply by thinking differently about tech support and how you get it.

Bookmark and Share

Tags:, ,
Posted in Digital literacy, Opinion, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Opinion: It IS about the technology

September 24, 2008

Target Image

You hear it all the time at education seminars, conferences and keynotes: “It’s not about the technology, it’s about the people.” Well, excuse me, but what a platitude — and how easy to get eduweb sceptics and the generally afeared on side when you tell them what they want to hear! Having said that, however, I am being a bit provocative in my title for this post …

Of course it’s about the people, but what’s often missing from the trite, unreflective maxim referred to above is the fact that people are technology, technology is people. We cannot be homo sapiens without technology.

Our mistake is to think of technology as only shiny, whizzy things that go bang. After all, a pencil is a technology. Writing itself is a technology. Indeed, a rock can be a technology, depending on the use to which it is put (I’m thinking ‘stone axe,’ here).

But to let the ‘It’s All About the People’ people off the hook, let’s acknowledge that they’re onto something, because what they’re pointing to is the need to focus more on the people than on the technology itself, if only because people are rather more inscrutable and intractable and difficult to handle than is the technology. This might seem counter-intuitive to some, but, when you think about it, it’s easier to figure out how to change the display order of a wiki page than it is to change the way a person thinks about, understands, and engages with their own relationship to technology. So, let’s work with the people, and acknowledge their apprehensions and help them make sense of how the technology works, but let’s also not lose sight of one of the things that makes us human to begin with.

Bookmark and Share

Tags:, ,
Posted in Digital literacy, Opinion, Technology | 2 Comments »

Target: The new digital divide

July 11, 2008

Target Image

I’m finally making my way through a report that’s been sitting on my desk for months, Bridging the Digital Divide: Creating opportunities for marginalised young people to get connected, available from VicHealth. What’s interesting about the report is that its findings in terms of ICT usage by marginalised young people largely support those of reports into other demographics. That is to say, marginalised young people (p. 2):

  • Are confident in their ICT skills
  • Use Instant Messaging, email and social networking services to communicate, and to maintain and build relationships
  • Create profiles on social networking sites such as Bebo and Hi5
  • Are aware of the potential dangers online and have ways of dealing with unwanted contact

Furthermore, in a finding that surprised the reports’ authors, the study showed that ICT plays a larger role in the lives of marginalised young people than previously thought. This surprise reflects a common assumption that I frequently come across when talking to both school and university teachers: that is, that ‘a good number’ of students have poor access to technology, or that a similar number are still on dial-up. Here are some results for the marginalised demographic:

  • 97% of participants in the study had access to the Internet: 44% at home, 30% in a library, 18% at school and 10% each from an Internet cafe or at work (p. 19).
  • 49% had broadband access, and 13% were on dial-up. 5% used wireless (p. 19).
  • Over half of participants accessed the Internet at least a few times a week (p. 40)
  • The young people involved in the study felt they had ICT skills of a high standard (p. 40)

This study reflects what Green and Hannon point out in Their Space: Education for a Digital Generation, that is tbat the new digital divide is more about access to knowledge, than it is about access to hardware (p. 17, pp 59-60). It’s knowing how to use these emerging technologies to best effect (in work and school and life) that’s going to be important from now on.

Bookmark and Share

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Digital literacy, Target | 1 Comment »

Target: Digital faith and moral panic

April 25, 2008

Target ImageIn a recent Demos report out of the UK (Their Space: Education for a digital generation), Hannah Green and Celia Hannon identify a number of ICT myths held by the moral panickers and by the followers of the digital faith. Here they are.

Moral panic myths

  • The internet is dangerous for children. The Demos research showed that most children are aware of stranger danger on the internet and are quite capable of self-regulating (p. 32). This is consistent with the findings of other reports such as that put out by the NSBA (pdf, 1MB).
  • Junk culture is poisoning young people and taking over their lives. Green and Hannon basically point out what an oooooold argument this is: youth culture always challenges the orthodoxy, they write, and they further point out that where once TV was the target, now the blame is spread across a wider spectrum of media (p. 34).
  • No learning happens and digital technologies are a waste of time. On the contrary, students are deploying a broad range of skills when using ICTs, which, the authors argue, often gives students the confidence to succeed in other, more formal contexts (pp. 35-36). Indeed, Green and Hannon demonstrate that children are often more able to identify educationally beneficial computer games than are adults (p. 36-37).
  • Report cover imageThere is an epidemic of internet plagiarism in schools. Plagiarism should not be conflated with new ways of accessing information, say Green and Hannon (p. 38), and we need to teach students the higher-order thinking skills of critique, interpretation, assessment and evaluation.
  • Young people are disengaged and disconnected. This is just flat-out wrong. Many students are using ICTs to engage with cultural and political issues and many also seek mentoring via their connections (p. 39).
  • We’re seeing the rise of a generation of passive consumers. Not true. Students are taking part in media communities, gaming communities, networking communities, you name it, and often there is a large element of production, communication and creativity going on with what Net Gen are doing online (p. 40-41). Hardly passive.

Digital faith myths

  • All gaming is good. There are different orders of digital activity in gaming, say Green and Hannon, and we need to be aware of that — just as many children are themselves, and not all activites are equal (p. 42).
  • All children are cyberkids. Here, we have to be careful not to talk about a certain set of behaviours demonstrated by those with high access and motivation with a whole generation. Green and Hannon found that there was a gap between ‘everyday communicators’ and the ‘digital pioneers’ (p. 42-43).

Bookmark and Share

Tags:, , , , , , ,
Posted in Digital literacy, Gaming, Net Gen, Target, Technology | Leave a Comment »

Target: Older people and ICTs

February 27, 2008

Target ImageWe know from the CIBER report (pdf) I referred to in a previous post that many older people are starting to catch up to younger people in terms of ICT competence. But what else can we say about older people’s attitudes to ICTs?

OfCom, the Office of Communications in the UK conducted a study (pdf) (why isn’t there more Aussie research??!!!) in July 2006 on just that topic. Here’s what they found:

  • Age is one of the most significant factors influencing whether or not people engage with ICTs (p. 1); however, attitude and character are key to whether or not people are actually connected to the internet (not health, age or income)
  • Tailoring the learning environment specifically for older people is essential to engaging them in taking up ICTs (p. 4)
  • Those who are not connected will find themselves increasingly excluded (p. 1)

Attitudes could be broken down into four segments, with two user-types (pp. 3-4):

  • Current users: Absorbers (obliged to learn computers at work) and Self-starters (had learnt themselves)
  • Non-user: Rejecters (people who, for diverse reasons, rejected ICT uptake entirely and disengaged (keen to learn, given the right circumstances)

Interestingly, for the most experienced users of tech, there was little emotional involvement; the opposite applied (feelings of wonder, excitement, fear, anxiety) to those who were less experienced (p. 5-6).

What we can certainly take away from the OfCom report is that older people who currently aren’t engaged in ICTs will certainly become so given patience and understanding on the part of those who teach them.

Bookmark and Share

Tags:, ,
Posted in Digital literacy, Target, Technology | Leave a Comment »

Target: Information behaviour of youngsters

February 18, 2008

Target ImageIn a recent post I pointed to CIBER’s report on Information behaviour of the researcher of the future (pdf) which showed that Net Gen behaviours aren’t necessarily specific to one discrete age group. Nevertheless, the report did present some findings about the search activities of the younger demographic:

  • The fit between search engines and students’ life styles today is ‘almost perfect’ — much better than is the fit for physical or online libraries (p. 7)
  • The speed of young people’s web searching indicates that they spend little time in evaluating information for accuracy, relevance or authority (p. 12). But this also seems to be a pre-Web phenomenon (p. 23)
  • There is little direct evidence that young people’s information literacy is any better or worse than before (p. 12)
  • Young scholars are using tools that require little skill and are satisfied with very basic forms of searching (p. 14)
  • Young people find it difficult to assess relevance when presented with a long string of hits (p. 12)
  • It is likely that young people have good parallel processing skills, but it is unclear whether they are similarly developing the sequential processing abilities required for ordinary reading (p. 18)
  • There is no evidence that young people are expert searchers. Studies pre-Web also reported that young people had difficulty in selecting search terms. (p. 22)
  • There has been an increase in full-phrase searching, but this, too, predates the Web (p. 22)

I think the most important thing we need to take away from this report is the notion that the lack of sophistication and critique that characterises young people’s information searching is not a new phenomenon, brought about by being online: rather, youngsters have always had trouble evaluating and assessing information for relevance — perhaps it’s just that now their information searching behaviour is more public.

Bookmark and Share

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Digital literacy, Net Gen, Target | Leave a Comment »

Target: We are all becoming Net Gen

February 16, 2008

Target ImageThe CIBER research team at University College London has just published a report that examines the Information behaviour of the researcher of the future (pdf). The report shows that it is not only youngsters but people from all age groups who exhibit certain behaviours when dealing with information on the internet. Here are some of the things CIBER found to be true across the generations when it comes to online behaviour:

  • Young people are more competent with technology, but older users are catching up fast (p. 18)
  • All of us are exhibiting increasing intolerance for information delay, not just the Net Gen (p. 19)
  • More and more people are ‘power browsing’ through virtual libraries (p. 10; p. 19)
  • Individual, personality and background factors are probably more important than generation when it comes to needing to feel constantly connected to the Web (p. 19)
  • We are increasingly looking for ‘the answer’ rather than a particular format (e.g., monograph, journal) (p. 8 )
  • Scholars are beginning to pre-publish their work through blogs, wikis and personal websites (p. 27)

These findings make perfect sense to me, because I increasingly see in myself and other, older net users many of the characteristics that are said to define Net Geners. What’s not important here is the age of the user but the fact that learners (most of whom will be young people) will be coming to us with certain ways of behaving in the cyber information environment. We need to know what those behaviours are.

Bookmark and Share

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Digital literacy, Net Gen, Target | Leave a Comment »

« Older Entries
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.