Task 2: Explain what digital literacies mean for you in a tertiary education context

2.1

The concept of digital literacy, as we know today, was introduced by Paul Gilster (1997) where he just didn’t focus on skills, instead, he emphasized that capability of interpreting information from a variety of digital sources. In an Interview with Carolyn Pool, Glister defined digital literacy as “the ability to understand and use information in multiple formats from a wide variety of sources when it is presented via computers” (Pool, 1997) He definitely led us to think digital literacy not just as technical skill but also to put a greater focus on “cognition of what we see in the screen when you use a networked medium” (Gilster, 1997). In a JISC article digital literacy was defined as “a set of academic and professional situated practices supported by diverse and changing technologies” (JISC, 2014). The book titled “Origins and concepts of digital literacy” by Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear (2008) contains a thorough review of the term “Digital Literacy” from a historic point of view. In today’s world, it is important to have digital literacy that encompasses media literacy and information literacy. The article by Kotley (2011) discusses the very nature of these three types of literacies which are inter-related.

 

With the knowledge gained from reviewing Digital Literacy from literature, I am going to define it digital literacy in my own terms starting from defining digital skills first. Digital skills are a set of capabilities that allow a person to find, use and create digital content in the form of text, audio and video on the Internet. In contrast, digital literacy goes beyond digital skills as it includes one’s ability to filter correct information, understand the context and implications of sharing the content in a cohesive and appropriate manner. That means having digital skills does not enable a person to have digital literacy until the overall perspective of the underlying content creation, distribution and social implications are understood. For example, one can find information online with basic digital skills, but to verify if the information is authentic (in a world where facts and fake news is hard to distinguish) requires skills to trace the source and review. Digital literacy also includes the capability to share content responsibly knowing that very often contents are deliberately sent with political and socio-economic bias. A digitally literate person is also capable of finding copyright issues of digital content they are creating, modifying or sharing.

 

References:

 

Gilster, P. (1997). Digital literacy. Wiley Computer Pub.

 

JISC. (2014, March 6). Developing digital literacies. Jisc. https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/developing-digital-literacies

Koltay, T. (2011). The media and the literacies: media literacy, information literacy, digital literacy. Media, Culture & Society, 33(2), 211–221. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443710393382

Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2008). Digital literacies: concepts, policies and practices. Peter Lang.

Pool, C. (1997). A new digital Literacy: A conversation with Paul Gilster - educational leadership. Integrating Technology into Teaching, 55(3), 6–11. http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/nov97/vol55/num03/A-New-Digital-Literacy@-A-Conversation-with-Paul-Gilster.aspx

 

 

2.2

Digital Literacy is extremely important for my formal learning aspect as I need to find authentic sources, understand the copyright issues and apply judgement before I share or re-use the contents.

2.3   The following a diagram of my Personal Learning Network :

Figure 7 Personal Learning Network

 

2.4

I believe digital literacy is an ongoing process where a person must keep adjusting and adopting to new technology and new socio-economic values. Since so much of today’s digital world is driven by advertising pushed to draw mass people’s attention, I have a lot more to learn in the way we can cultivate against this evil mindset that only thinks about profit or political agenda. The following are few tasks I will be doing to improve my digital literacy skills further:

 

1. I will start with designing few lesson plans for students following the direction of OERu book titled "Web literacy for student Fact-Checkers" by Mike Caulfield for cultivating fact-checking habits by controlling emotions. This will not only help me further improve my fact-checking skills, but also will help my learners to achieve that essential skills. If we can raise awareness about this to mass people, we will be able to make the impacts of fake-news, manipulative-news very minimum. Fake-news propagate by taking advantage of knowledge about users’ psychology. By developing fact-checking skills users will be able to

Filter which digital content to read/view and share. It is more about building fact-checking habits by controlling one’s emotions. I believe I will be able to improve my fact-checking skills more when I develop the lesson plans and continue to teach learners about this skill.

 

2. The next  I want to improve my understanding about copyright issues. I want to learn more about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCA) and its implication on digital contents on the Internet. I will learn by reading about it and finding examples of how it applies to different countries context. Since we use information from the Internet for both personal and professional purposes, it is really important to understand the copyright implications of such content.

 

3. I will work on improving my understanding about the article 270 of US communication Act that gives immunity to platforms like Facebook, Instagram from the content published by its users. Recently, there has been an ongoing discussion about bringing changes to these legislations to make social media companies to be liable for content hosted on their platform. This move is controversial as it givesthe platform a role of arbitrator in deciding what content gets published and what not. I want to learn more about this as understanding content creation and distribution process is a very important aspect of digital literacy. I want to learn about this by reading articles and books. The article titled “assault on platforms and section 230” is a good starting point in that direction.