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It involves a working knowledge of current high-technology, and an understanding of how it can be used.

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Digital literacy researchers explore a wide variety of topics, including how people find, use, summarize, evaluate, create, and communicate information while using digital technologies. Research also encompasses a variety of hardware platforms, such as computer hardware, cell phones and other mobile devices and software or applications, including web search or Internet applications more broadly. As a result, the area is concerned with much more than how people learn to use computers. In Scandinavian English as well as in OECD research, the term Digital Competence is preferred over literacy due to its holistic use. A digitally literate person may be described as a digital citizen.

Learners must be taught how to learn in a digital society. In other words, learners must be taught to learn anything, anytime, anywhere.

Business, military, and medicine are excellent examples of how technology is being used differently in the 21st century. As new technologies emerge, learners need to learn how to use that technology quickly and appropriately. Digital Citizenship involves educating people in a new way— these individuals need a high degree of information literacy skills.

We recognize inappropriate behavior when we see it, but before people use technology they do not learn digital etiquette (i.e., appropriate conduct).

It is not enough to create rules and policy, we must teach everyone to become responsible digital citizens in this new society.

Users need to understand that stealing or causing damage to other people’s work, identity, or property online is a crime.

Hacking into others information, downloading illegal music, plagiarizing, creating destructive worms, viruses or creating Trojan Horses, sending spam, or stealing anyone’s identify or property is unethical.

In any society, there are individuals who steal, deface, or disrupt other people. The same is true for the digital community.

We need to have virus protection, backups of data, and surge control of our equipment. As responsible citizens, we must protect our information from outside forces that might cause disruption or harm.

Now everyone has the opportunity to communicate and collaborate with anyone from anywhere and anytime

digital rights and supporting electronic access is the starting point of Digital Citizenship

Digital citizenship can be defined as the norms of appropriate, responsible behavior with regard to technology use. 

For young people today, it is vital that formal education begin to offer a bridge from the often insular and entertainment-focused digital culture of the home to a wider, broader range of cultural and civic experiences that support their intellectual, cultural, social and emotional development.

simply buying computers for schools does not necessarily lead to digital and media literacy education. Schools have a long way to go on this front. Access to broadband is a substantial issue as diffusion is uneven across American cities and towns (Levin, 2010).

andatory Internet filtering in schools means that many important types of social media are not available to teachers or students. And though there are computers with Internet access in most classrooms, fewer than half of American teachers can display a website because they do not have a data projector available to them.

Many American parents mistakenly believe that simply providing children and young people with access to digital technology will automatically enhance learning.

the “soccer mom” has been replaced by the “technology mom” who purchases a Leapfrog electronic toy for her baby, lap-surfs with her toddler, buys a Wii, an xBox and a Playstation for the kids and their friends, puts the spare TV set in the child’s bedroom, sets her child down for hours at a time to use social media like Webkinz and Club Penguin, and buys a laptop for her pre-teen so she will not have to share her own computer with the child.

In many American homes, the computer is primarily an entertainment device, extending the legacy of the television, which is still viewed for more than 3 hours per day by children aged 8 to 18, who spend 10 to 12 hours every day with some form of media (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2010). The computer is used for downloading music, watching videos, playing games and interacting on social networks.

Content risks – This includes exposure to potentially offensive or harmful content, including violent, sexual, sexist, racist, or hate material. Contact risks – This includes practices where people engage in harassment, cyber bullying and cyber stalking; talk with strangers; or violate privacy. Conduct risks – This includes lying or intentionally misinforming people, giving out personal information, illegal downloading, gambling, hacking and more.

For example, when it comes to sexuality, both empowerment and protection are essential for children, young people and their families. Young people can use the Internet and mobile phone texting services to ask difficult questions about sexuality, get accurate information about sexual heath and participate in online communities. The Internet also enables and extends forms of sexual expression and experimentation, often in new forms, including webcams and live chat. Pornography is a multibillion dollar industry in the United States. In a country with the highest teenage pregnancy rate of all Western industrialized countries in the world, a recent report from the Witherspoon Institute (2010) offers compelling evidence that the prevalence of pornography in the lives of many children and adolescents is far more significant than most adults realize, that pornography may be deforming the healthy sexual development of young people, and that it can be used to exploit children and adolescents. Teens have many reasons to keep secret their exposure to pornography, and many are unlikely to tell researchers about their activities. But about 15 percent of teens aged 12 to 17 do report that they have received sexually explicit images on their cell phones from people they knew personally (Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2009).

Expanding the Concept of Literacy. Make no mistake about it: digital and media literacy does not replace or supplant print literacy. At a time when the word “text” now means any form of symbolic expression in any format that conveys meaning, the concept of literacy is simply expanding. Literacy is beginning to be understood as the ability to share meaning through symbol systems in order to fully participate in society. Print is now one of an interrelated set of symbol systems for sharing meaning. Because it takes years of practice to master print literacy, effective instruction in reading and writing is becoming more important than ever before. To read well, people need to acquire decoding and comprehension skills plus a base of knowledge from which they can interpret new ideas. To write, it is important to understand how words come together to form ideas, claims and arguments and how to design messages to accomplish the goals of informing, entertaining or persuading.

Check out Raising a Digital Child and Digital Citizenship in Schools to learn more, both available at www.amazon.com.

Digital Immigrants, that would be most of the teachers (but not all) do things like print our email, while the Natives do not even use email any more! They use text and instant messaging.

What it means to be digitally literate has reflected the change in how information is processed, delivered, and received in today's highly connected world.

 Students must understand how to use digital tools to gather facts, interpret, analyze and create meaning, even create new meaning from the information they gather. Becoming truly literate means embracing a new framework of learning that layers core content into a world rich in digital and media literacies

he ability to use digital technology, communication tools or networks to locate, evaluate, use and create information. 1 The ability to understand and use information in multiple formats from a wide range of sources when it is presented via computers. 2 A person’s ability to perform tasks effectively in a digital environment... Literacy includes the ability to read and interpret media, to reproduce data and images through digital manipulation, and to evaluate and apply new knowledge gained from digital environments. 3

media, to r

understand and use information in multiple formats

The ability to use digital technology, communication tools or networks to locate, evaluate, use and create information.

Due to the obvious divide set between digital natives and digital immigrants, sometimes both generations are forced to meet which commonly results in conflicting ideologies of digital technology. The everyday regime of worklife is becoming more technologically advanced with improved computers in offices, more complicated machinery in industry etc. With technology moving so fast it is hard for digital immigrants to keep up.

This creates conflicts among older supervisors and managers with the increasingly younger workforce. Similarly, parents clash with their children at home over gaming, texting, YouTube, Facebook and other Internet technology issues. The Pluralist Generation is made up of digital natives

Education, as Marc Prensky states, is the single largest problem facing the digital world as our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language. Immigrants suffer complications in teaching natives how to understand an environment which is "native" to them and foreign to Immigrants. Prensky's own preference to this problem is to invent computer games to teach digital natives the lessons they need to learn, no matter how serious. This ideology has already been introduced to a number of serious practicalities.

The term suggests a familiarity with technology that not all children and young adults who would be considered digital natives have, though some instead have an awkwardness with technology that not all digital immigrants have.

A digital native is a person who was born during or after the general introduction of digital technologies and through interacting with digital technology from an early age, has a greater understanding of its concepts.

The way students learn and their abilities to showcase their learning has surpassed the years of book reports, posters, and shoe box representations. "We will not be able to achieve a liberating, collective intelligence until we can achieve a collective digital literacy, and we have now, more than ever, perhaps, the opportunity and the technologies to assist  us in the human project of shaping, creating, authoring and developing ourselves as the formers of our own culture.

Digital literacy is one component of being a digital citizen - a person who is responsible for how they utilize technology to interact with the world around them.

full electronic participation in society. Technology users need to be aware that not everyone has the same opportunities when it comes to technology.  Working toward equal digital rights and supporting electronic access is the starting point of Digital Citizenship. Digital exclusion makes it difficult to grow as a society increasingly using these tools. Helping to provide and expand access to technology should be goal of all digital citizens.  Users need to keep in mind that there are some that may have limited access, so other resources may need to be provided.  To become productive citizens, we need to be committed to make sure that no one is denied digital access.

Unfortunately, many users have not been taught how to make appropriate decisions when faced with so many different digital communication options.

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.

chools will remain places for parents to put their kids while they go to work, and for society to train a fresh supply of citizen-worker-consumers to be employed by the industries of their time.

But the kind of questioning, collaborative, active, lateral rather than hierarchical pedagogy that participatory media both forces and enables is not the kind of change that takes place quickly or at all in public schools.

someone needs to educate children about the necessity for critical thinking and encourage them to exercise their own knowledge of how to make moral choices.

the basic moral values – is supposed to be what their parents and their religions are responsible for.

But the teachable skill of knowing how to make decisions based on those values has become particularly important now that a new medium suddenly connects young people to each other and to the world's knowledge in ways no previous generation experienced.

e teach our kids how to cross the street and what to be careful about in the physical world. And now parents need to teach their kids how to exercise good sense online. It's really no more technical than reminding your children not to give out their personal information to strangers on the telephone or the street. When it comes to helping them learn how to be citizens in a democracy, media literacy education is central to 21st century civic education.

At the same time that emerging media challenge the ability of old institutions to change, I think we have an opportunity today to make use of the natural enthusiasm of today's young digital natives for cultural production as well as consumption, to help them learn to use the media production and distribution technologies now available to them to develop a public voice about issues they care about.

The media available to adolescents today, from videocameraphones to their own websites, to laptop computers, to participatory media communities like MySpace and Youtube, are orders of magnitude more powerful than those available in the age of the deskbound, text-only Internet and dial-up speeds.

Those young people who can afford an Internet-connected phone or laptop are taking to the multimedia web on their own accord by the millions– MySpace gets Google-scale traffic and Youtube serves one hundred million videos a day.

Although the price of entry is dropping, there is still an economic divide; nevertheless, the online population under the age of 20 is significant enough for Rupert Murdoch to spend a quarter billion dollars to buy MySpace.

Immigrants grew up learning one topic at a time, everything in order, following a linear and logical progression, but Natives do not think that way.

Another major difference between Immigrants and Natives is a sense of identity (DigitalNative.org, 2007).  To Digital Immigrants, cell phones, emails, and the Internet are just tools that can be used to reach someone or set up a “real” face-to-face meeting. Natives look at the same technologies and see an extension of who they are.

Digital communication is just as real to Natives as face-to-face meetings are to Immigrants.   

Many Immigrants consider education as the process that forces as much information into students’ heads as possible so they can regurgitate a laundry list of facts at a moment’s notice. Natives donotconsider this an education.

Immigrants should be willing to teach Natives how to find important information and put less emphasis on forcing the students to learn exact information.

Prensky, Marc. (2007) To Educate, We Must Listen. Retrievedfrom http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky-To_Educate,We_Must_Listen.pdf

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