Digital Literacy
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The most significant challenge with teaching digital literacy is that the skills are social, cognitive, and cultural, not technical, so the student must learn nuances instead of a sequence of tasks. Turning on a computer and connecting to the internet are technical skills, whereas digital literacies depend the ability to curate their online presence from which their digital reputation is formed, competently consume information sources that influence opinions, and communicate to a mostly public audience which is a drastically different skill when compared to talking with friends and family.
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“The view of digital literacy offered by Jisc (2015) is even more comprehensive” (Brown, 2021). The first two features require critical thinking skills to use and consume digital content, and also to produce it which allows participation. Secondarily, though also important, is an effort to continue to learn in order to actualize ones goals and dreams for the future. Because technology changes so quickly, for example Moore’s Law suggests that computing power doubles every two years, being able to continue to use technology will require new skills, at least in our lifetime. As computing power increases, so do the uses for technology. Voice-controlled equipment, self-driving cars, and ovens that can manage the temperature to avoid burning food, these are all good examples of innovations that required substantial computing power to implement. Like all great innovations, when computing powers doubles a few more times in the next 5 or 6 years, new innovations that are only dreams right now will become possible.
Being able to browse a website is enough for someone to learn but being able to use search engines to investigate the source material efficiently is a better example of digital literacy. Being able to connect a router to a wireless modem is a basic technical skill for most people but being able to modify the firewall default settings so that houseguests can use their devices is another example of digital literacy. Finally, understanding the differences between communicating with a unknown public, instead of just friends and family, is a core competency of digital literacy. The public often requires more information than our friends – who tend to share some of our interests or have heard about them in conversation already. The public engages what we contribute to digital discussions based on their unpredictably diverse backgrounds and they will interpret the same story in wildly divergent ways.
Being able to browse a website is enough for someone to learn but being able to use search engines to investigate the source material efficiently is a better example of digital literacy. Being able to connect a router to a wireless modem is a basic technical skill for most people but being able to modify the firewall default settings so that houseguests can use their devices is another example of digital literacy. Finally, understanding the differences between communicating with a unknown public, instead of just friends and family, is a core competency of digital literacy. The public often requires more information than our friends – who tend to share some of our interests or have heard about them in conversation already. The public engages what we contribute to digital discussions based on their unpredictably diverse backgrounds and they will interpret the same story in wildly divergent ways.
Digital Citizenship
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Blog posts on Medium.com...
Proprietary Forks and Knives (July 25, 2022) Social Citizenship Forever (July 18, 2022) Knowledge Equity Theory (July 11, 2022) |
Thinking Big
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Blog posts on Medium.com...
Stardust, Fuzzy Dice, and Privacy Algorithms (February 21, 2022) Unthread the Content! (February 17, 2022) Digital Inclusion Begins with Access and Hardware (February 22, 2022) |