Digital literacy

Yesterday I attended a very interesting seminar as part of the ALTC-Viral project, which MPOW is a part of.

The talk that stuck in my head most was the introductory one given by Dr Megan Poore from Canberra. She talked about the concept of digital literacy, citing Wikipedia:

“Digital literacy is the ability to locate, organize, understand, evaluate, and create information using digital technology.”

And supplementing it with more from an organisation called the Northwest Learning Grid:

“1) the ability to define the task, and, 2) the ability to communicate” (More on their definition)

She suggested that digital literacy could be considered to consist of three parts:

1. Functional digital literacy – knowing how to “read” a webpage, how to sign up for a service (what’s a username), how to find and add friends, how to upload a photo, a file, etc. Are students functionally literate? Megan suggested that for many students The Internet is just Facebook, Google, and YouTube. You can improve people’s functional digital literacy by providing training. The hard part is changing mindsets and attitudes, overcoming fear, embracing new ways of thinking.
2. Network digital literacy – what does it mean to be a citizen online? How does one manage profiles and identities? What happens to your uploaded data? Do you understand what you’re signing up for – did you actually read the Terms of Service statement that you just clicked yes to? What about copyright?
3. Critical digital literacy – “interrogation of how the digital world works”; engagement, debate, discussion

How digitally literate am I? I think my literacy level is probably okay but I can be a tad blase about things.

Other points I am still pondering:

• Students may be confident, but does this mean they are actually competent in their understanding of how tech works?
• Students are not born expert searchers just by virtue of growing up with tech – many have difficulty filtering and evaluating all that information
• We should be teaching digital literacy skills systematically, rather than expecting it to be picked up incidentally
• What is the digital literacy level of uni/library staff? What is the minimal level we should have? How can we teach/help students if we don’t know what’s out there, or our own digital literacy levels are very low?

I have been pondering ways of making our information literacy classes relevant and attractive to students and wondering how we can get away from the “step-by-step” model where we try to explain where things are on-screen and what to click next – I wonder if this sort of approach can be explained by the fact that some librarians have very low functional digital literacy and are not good at reading the Web. If we have low or undeveloped skills how can we expect to train or help others effectively? How much time do we actually spend talking about evaluating the information we find? How do we think about the information that’s out there on the Web? (Do we know what’s out there?)

Megan also suggested that many of our colleagues have been traumatised by the early Web, so that for many the Web still sits in the Too Hard basket. How do we show them how easy it is? (No you don’t need a manual!)

I had my iPad and MiFi with me and so I tried to tweet* what I was listening to, with reasonable success. At times I failed to tweet – like when I was either distracted by random thoughts in my head, or too distracted [to tweet!] because I was concentrating so much on what the speaker was saying. That’s just how it goes, I guess.

*the tag is #altcviral