Digital Literacy

Description of presentation from academic seminar series on digital Policy: Connectivity, Creativity and Rights.

April 26, 2011 - Bobbi Newman

From understanding what digital literacy is, to developing skills and establishing ethical principles for students, our live chat panel share ideas and resources for universities

The Digitally Ready team recently invited staff and students to a workshop to explore and reflect on their own digital literacies. We asked people to feedback from their groups and their own personal reflections about access to facilities, their digital skills or lack of them, what they do and don't do in practice. Emerging trends suggest that although basic needs are robustly fulfilled - hardware, software and a good network - the overriding message is that most people feel they do not have adequate time to develop and discover how new technologies can be useful and relevant to them. Some people seem unaware of what is currently available and where they can go for help. It was suggested that colleagues who share best practice provide a powerful trigger for others to invest time in personal development. We finally asked people to complete 'To become more digitally ready, I will…….'

 A (brief!) history of digital literacy inthe UK and the EU Tabetha Newman Sarah Payton April 2012 PowerPoints from the recent webinar with detailed notes

This has been taken down?...already?

The insertion of social media in education has the potential to advance core aims of our society: to teach students how to engage with their families, neighbors, and communities in a new way. The combination of social media and education requires that we teach students how to become literate in a digital world. The skills of literacy are no longer just about reading and writing, but about abilities that surround our responsibilities as authors. In Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action, researcher Renee Hobbs offers that digital and media literacy is constructed of five crucial abilities:

Student's reflections on a digital literacy assignment at Full Sail University shared on YouTube. See also http://youtu.be/7OcbFtT1xuU

"The Faculty Learning Communities discussed this idea in their creative think tank sessions with the aim of articulating a digital literacy definition for each Faculty or School. These digital literacy definitions have been shared with the wider community on this blog as one of the project outputs.   These statements are also joined by a list of Faculty digital literacy attributes for learners. The stakeholders in the Faculty Learning Communities devised and then refined a set of digital literacy competencies for learners based on the JISC Learning Literacies Development Framework. The digital literacy attributes for each Faculty and School are made available below." Each of the competencies is avaialable as a PDF poster.

Try guessing how many apps have permissions to access your private information... Now click the icons and get ready for a surprise!

"Do we really need measures of online reputation? Can our worth be measured by the amount of Twitter followers we have or by how many +1s we receive on Google+?   Klout, Peerindex and other social reputation measuring sites are constantly bombarding web users with statistics about their 'true reach', 'amplification' and 'influence'. It all sounds very grand. And yet what is the actual value of these metrics? What does it mean that I currently have a Klout score of 60? This number is calculated among other things, on an analysis of my recent web activity on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ over the last 90 days."   Steve Wheeler

Scholars and teachers alike agree that today's students need more than alphabetic literacy to communicate effectively in a world increasingly suffused with digital media and information. 

Blog post about moving open practice from niche into mainstream.

Liverpool City Council has made a long-term commitment to really drive digital literacy in the city. The "Go ON it's Liverpool" programme is focusing on the benefits a fully networked city would bring to both citizens and the business community.

Students without the skills to use digital tools risk an inferior learning process at best, and being left behind at worst

Description of apps and digital storytelling used to engagea a class of demotivated learners.

"Your brain's important, but not all that important," said Dr. James Paul Gee, a professor at Arizona State University and a leading authority on literacy and the potential of educational games, during a talk at the Learning and Brain conference last week.

Resources and tips to help teachers incorporate digital literacy skills into content area learning.

"The 2011 ECAR National (USA) Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology gathered stratified data from "3,000 college students from 1,179 colleges and universities" via an opt-in invitation-only online questionnaire, in June 2011."