Critical Digital Literacy Explained for Teachers

December, 2014
Critical digital literacy is one of the essential required competencies for the 21st century educator. In an era of unprecedented personal publishing, infobesity (information obesity) becomes a real issue. Teachers need to be able to critically  assess and evaluate the materials and knowledge they come across. This could be done through adopting a critical thinking lens to filter things that could otherwise unconsciously affect one's stance and interpretation of  a given meaning.

Juliet Hinrichsen and Antony Coombs from University of Greenwich developed this excellent framework to help you understand the concept of critical digital literacy. This framework is made up of 5 dimensions:

Source: http://goo.gl/fBdraV

1- Decoding:
"Learners need to develop familiarity with the structures and conventions of digital media, sensitivity to the different modes at work within digital artefacts and confident use of the operational frameworks within which they exist."

2- Meaning making
"This recognizes the agency of the learner as a participant in the construction of a text. Making meaning is a reflexive process in which the content, style and purpose of the text is in dialogue with the prior experience, knowledge and responses of the reader. Making meaning implies both understanding and interpretation".

3- Analysing
"Learners to develop the ability to make informed judgements and choices in the digital domain.They also need to be able to apply critical, aesthetic and ethical perspectives to the production and consumption of digitized material."

4- Persona
"Sensitivity to the issues of reputation, identity and membership within different digital contexts. The purposeful management and calibration of one's online persona. Developing a sense of belonging and a confident participant role."

5- Using
"Learners need to develop the ability to deploy digital tools appropriately and effectively for the task in hand. They also need to be able to solve practical problems dynamically and flexibly as they arise, using a range of methods and approaches, both individually and as part of communities."

Courtesy of Teachthought where I learned about this work.

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The 11 Skills Underlying 21st Century New Literacies

November 19, 2014
Historically speaking, studies of literacy have undergone two major shifts over the last four or five decades. The first shift took place in early seventies and eighties with the publication of a series of works such as The Literacy Myth (Harvey Graff, 1979), The Psychology of Literacy (Scribner & Cole, 1981), Literacy in Theory and Practice ( Brain Street, 1984), The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life (Richard Hoggart, 1957). These studies challenged the established and traditional approaches to literacy which, until then, was considered a personal affair, an individual cognitive process. These studies emphasized the social and cultural aspects of literacy and advanced the view that literacy is a social practice, a social event mediated by text. (for a detailed account of this development, read "New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Classroom Learning").

Source of image: http://goo.gl/wq5b4d

The second major shift emerges with the uptake of the social networking sites and participatory technologies. Now, we no longer talk about a single literacy but multiple literacies. Literacies take many forms and encompass a varied body of social skills and cultural competencies. In their popular white paper "Confronting The Challenges of Participatory Cultures" Jenkins et al talked at length  about the development of these new literacies and how they come to shape the new learning forms that take place in the virtual space. According to Jenkins et al, these new literacies involve several social skills that are developed through collaboration and networking. These skills include :

1- Play:
The capacity to experiment with the surroundings as a form of problem solving.

2- Performance:
The ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery.

3-Simulation
The ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes.

4-Appropriation:
The ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content.

5- Multitasking
The ability to scan the environment and shift focus onto salient details.

6- Distributed cognition:
The ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities.

7- Collective intelligence:
The ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal.

8- Judgment:
The ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources.

9- Transmedia navigation:
The ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities.

10- Networking
The ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information.

11- Negotiation:
The ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

(Excerpt from  the white paper cited above, page XIV).

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Awesome Poster On Digital Literacy

October 28, 2014
Since the uptake of digital media and the boon in internet technologies, digital literacy becomes at the centre of literacy discussion. Digital literacy is not an aim in and of itself but a means to achieving a general goal: enhancing students learning in a digitally focused context.  In other words, by being digitally literate, students will be able to capitalize on the diverse resources provided by the net to create optimal learning experiences.

On a fundamental level, digital literacy involves a mysterious mixture of different "knows": know-how (practical knowledge), know-what (factual knowledge), know-why (critical knowledge),  and know-who (communicational knowledge). Some people confuse digital literacy with computer literacy or with computation and technical skills. To them digital literacy is summarized in practical knowledge which is a blatant fallacy. Being a digital literate requires more than just possessing digital and technical skills, it also calls for many other skills such as synthesizing, evaluating, critiquing, and presenting information. In the visual below, Mark Carbone suggests some really excellent ways to develop digital literacy. I invite you to have a look and share with us what you think of them.

Click here to see the full original visual.

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