- Share This Post
- submit
- 2
-
Sparkle (0)
Recently, the director of the teaching resources center where I work turned to me and asked, "What does it mean for students at our university to be digitally literate?" And if answering that question wasn't complicated enough, the additional question implied within it--and how can we encourage instructors to instill digital literacy in their students?--is even more daunting.
Discussions of digital literacy tend to focus on a few key constituencies: K-8 students, high school students, and college students. Frequently left out of these discussions are teachers themselves, as well as anyone who is no longer a student--as if digital literacy is something that is to be learned entirely in grades K-16.
The discussions of digital literacy in K-8 lean, understandably, toward safety and security on the Internet, and particularly while participating in online communities. Coming along for the ride are old school computer skills like keyboarding and word processing. But as Silvia Tolisano points out at Langwitches (building on a definition by Victor Castilla), digital literacy is not just learning these skills, but also learning to solve problems within digital environments. It's also, Tolisano emphasizes, a skill that teachers need to learn (and learn to teach) instead of relying on the school's computer resources specialist letting students try to figure it out on their own. This technologically-based problem solving needs to happen within the framework of the curriculum's content, rather than be taught as an isolated skill set.
When I was in elementary school, I remember watching a film about the deceptions of commercials on TV. Today, elementary and middle-school students need to learn not just how to be "safe" online, but also how to assess the veracity of sources. Vicki Davis was reminded of the importance of such skills when her seventh-grade son was using Google to research the events of September 11. She writes,
You see, when he typed 9/11 facts -- he found a conspiracy theory website(s) and came out of it thinking someone had bombed the building.
Similarly, SMeech offers an example of a racist group's site that masquerades as a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. Because tech-savvy webmasters can optimize such sites for search engines, it's entirely possible that sites that offer alternative and frequently unpalatable narratives, including outright lies, can wind up in the first couple pages of a web search--and it's been my experiences that students (even in college) frequently don't click past the first two pages of results.
Yes, a seventh-grader needs to be able to tell the difference between a traditional narrative of September 11 and a conspiracy theorist's narrative. But high school and college students need to be able to take it a step further: they need to know how to question the veracity of the traditional narrative and assess the claims of the conspiracy theorist. In many ways, this is old-school information literacy, this assessing a source's validity. But in a digital age, students are going to turn to digital sources to do this verifying, so they need to know which digital sources and tools they might use in this process.
In short, they need to know how to be good digital citizens: to assess veracity, engage in conversations with the media-makers, and to make media themselves.
Howard Rheingold of the Sydney Morning Herald hits the nail on the head in a recent column:
Talking to my daughter about search engines and the necessity for a 10-year-old to question texts online led me to think that computer literacy programs that left out critical thinking were missing an important point. But I discovered when I talked to teachers in my local schools that "critical thinking" is regarded by some as a plot to incite children to question authority. At that point, I saw education - the means by which young people learn the skills necessary to succeed in their place and time - as diverging from schooling.
Constructivist theories of education that exhort teachers to guide active learning through hands-on experimentation are not new ideas, and neither is the notion that digital media can be used to encourage this kind of learning. What is new is a population of "digital natives" who learnt how to learn new kinds of software before they started high school, who carry mobile phones, media players, game devices and laptop computers and know how to use them, and for whom the internet is not a transformative new technology but a feature of their lives that has
