MY NEW UNDERSTANDING OF DIGITAL LITERACY

As new technologies and media are used more and more in teaching and learning, as well as in the home and throughout social life, we need to develop more than just ICT skills; we need a broad digital awareness of the wider context in which technologies and media operate to wrap around these skills in order that we can participate in this increasingly digital world.

 Consequently, there have been many recent attempts to define strategies for teaching and learning that take account of our need for skills, knowledge and understanding in the use of new technology and media. Often, this is called ‘digital literacy’.

So, what does ‘digital literacy’ really mean? To possess ‘literacy’ in traditional terms means being able to read and write in the shared language of a culture. Digital literacy shares some similarities. It refers to the reading and writing of digital texts, for example being able to ‘read’ a website by navigating through hyperlinks and ‘writing’ by uploading digital photos to a social networking site. In this sense, digital literacy means the functional skills required to operate and communicate with technology and media. It also refers to the knowledge of how technologies and media affect the world. The internet now makes it possible to look up information on almost any area of human interest in just a few moments. Doing so requires some simple operational skills, but more importantly it requires the ability to be analytical and evaluative about the knowledge that is available on the web.

In fact, what it means to acquire knowledge is now changing significantly.

So digital literacy means knowing how technology and media affect the ways in which we go about finding things out, communicating with one another, and gaining knowledge and understanding. And it also means understanding how technologies and media can shape and influence the ways in which school subjects can be taught and learnt. In a dense landscape of information sources, communication opportunities, and tools for creating new digital objects, teaching and learning cannot be confined to pen and paper activities.

This means that learners and we teachers need to make sense of how technologies can be used within subjects and to understand how such technologies affect what we know about those subjects.

 Therefore digital literacy is an amalgamation of:

Knowledge of digital tools: hardware/software awareness and competence.

Critical skills: evaluation and contextualization.

Social awareness: understanding your identity, collaborating, and communicating to audiences in context.

Knowledge of digital tools: hardware/software awareness and competence.

Operational involves the ability to use a system of language and to read and write in an appropriate and adequate manner in a range of different contexts.

Creative refers to the ability to produce meaningful and engaging content in appropriate formats and for particular audiences.

Collaborative means to communicate, interact and work with others to create shared understandings and meaning.

Find and select: Knowing what information is available and being able to retrieve it.

Life and career skills: Today’s life and work environments require far more than thinking skills and content knowledge. The ability to navigate the complex life and work environments in the globally competitive information age requires students to pay rigorous.

I have shared with you my visual representation of how I understand digital literacy.