Group items tagged

"Blanchard's and Moore's research finds that developmental milestones are changing as a new generation of young children approach learning and literacy in ways not thought possible in the past. According to this new report, digital media is already transforming the language and cultural practices that enable early literacy development, making possible a new kind of personal and global interconnectedness. The research reveals that: * Opportunities to engage with digital media increasingly prevail through the use of mobile devices-and in developing countries access to mobile devices is more commonplace than access to other technologies * Developmental milestones are changing as young people's access to mobile and digital technology grows. * Digital media positively impacts children's opinion of learning, providing engagement opportunities not always seen with print materials."

"Digital literacy is so important," said Julius Genachowski, chairman of the commission, adding that bridging the digital divide now also means "giving parents and students the tools and know-how to use technology for education and job-skills training."

"Key Takeaways Education built around digital portfolios not only ties together various student-generated artifacts into a coherent whole but also creates an environment in which technology use has a clearly identified purpose. Hundreds of services provide free hosting and website creation tools and are ideal platforms for digital portfolios because they can support just about any type of digital content. Turning consumers of knowledge into producers of knowledge transforms learning into an active experience."

I think this is an important stating of the assumptions built into technology and the outcomes resulting from these assumptions and inherent biases. "... we need to understand how the shape of information access controls the intellectual (and, ultimately, financial) opportunities of some college students. If we emphasize the consequences of differential access, we see one facet of the digital divide; if we ask about how these consequences are produced, we are asking about digital redlining. The comfortable elision in "edtech" is dangerous; it needs to be undone by emphasizing the contexts, origins, aims, and ideologies of technologies."

"The student digital experience tracker, a pilot scheme to provide first-hand insight into learners' expectations and views on technology in an education setting, showed that 72% of HE and 70% of FE and skills learners believe that when technology is used effectively by teaching staff it enhances their learning experience - giving credence to the argument that practitioners need to develop their own digital skills to deliver learning and teaching."

"Technology stewards are people with enough experience of the workings of a community to understand its technology needs..."<--useful idea for digital literacy? Wider in scope than teaching/eLearning advocates. Hope to chat with Nancy in Hobart.

Like this concept. Like the connection between technology and community awareness.

"Within a week of the emergence of Occupy Wall Street, a library surfaced in the midst of the protest. Staffed by volunteers and comprised entirely of donated materials, the People's Library offers books and media to the public, provides basic reference assistance and has built an online catalog of their holdings. In this paper, I analyze the People's Library in terms of larger discussions of libraries, technology and activism. Drawing on personal experiences volunteering at the Library as well as text from the Library's blog, I argue that the People's Library offers two counter arguments to conventional claims about the public library: first, that libraries are being existentially threatened by the emergence of digital technologies and second, that a library's institutional ethics are located solely or predominantly in the content of its collection. Using the People's Library as a kind of conceptual case study, I explore the connections between public libraries, digital technologies and activist ideologies."

"Higher education institutions face a number of opportunities and challenges as the result of the digital revolution. The institutions perform a number of scholarship functions which can be affected by new technologies, and the desire is to retain these functions where appropriate, whilst the form they take may change. Much of the reaction to technological change comes from those with a vested interest in either wholesale change or maintaining the status quo. Taking the resilience metaphor from ecology, the authors propose a framework for analysing an institution's ability to adapt to digital challenges. This framework is examined at two institutions (the UK Open University and Canada's Athabasca University) using two current digital challenges, namely Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Open Access publishing."

White paper from Hewlett Packard. Suggests that NZ is very lacking in producing a digital ready workforce and having a dacent digital technologies curriculum in education.

"This Ministry of Education report describes a project undertaken to explore what digital information literacy is and how individuals can obtain it. Digital information literacy takes dedicated time, intensive support and the opportunity to experiment with a range of information and communication technologies."

RT @josiefraser: Summary of technologies in use in the #JISC Developing Digital Literacies Programme http://t.co/90ntlTEp #digitalliteracy

"At the end of the twentieth century, intellectual property rights collided with everyday life. Expansive copyright laws and digital rights management technologies sought to shut down new forms of copying and remixing made possible by the Internet. International laws expanding patent rights threatened the lives of millions of people around the world living with HIV/AIDS by limiting their access to cheap generic medicines. For decades, governments have tightened the grip of intellectual property law at the bidding of information industries; but recently, groups have emerged around the world to challenge this wave of enclosure with a new counter-politics of "access to knowledge" or "A2K." They include software programmers who took to the streets to defeat software patents in Europe, AIDS activists who forced multinational pharmaceutical companies to permit copies of their medicines to be sold in poor countries, subsistence farmers defending their rights to food security or access to agricultural biotechnology, and college students who created a new "free culture" movement to defend the digital commons. Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property maps this emerging field of activism as a series of historical moments, strategies, and concepts. It gathers some of the most important thinkers and advocates in the field to make the stakes and strategies at play in this new domain visible and the terms of intellectual property law intelligible in their political implications around the world. A Creative Commons edition of this work will be freely available online."

We envision communications infrastructure that is owned and operated cooperatively, by the whole of humanity, rather than by corporations and states.We are using the power of peer-to-peer technologies to create a global network which is immune to censorship and resistant to breakdown.We promote freedoms, support innovations and advocate technologies that enhance and enable digital self-determination.

"'We found no evidence for any discontinuity in technology use around the age of 30 as would be predicted by the Net Generation and Digital Natives hypothesis,' says the report. What the reseachers do find interesting and worthy of further study is the correlation--which is independent of age--between attitudes to technology and approaches to studying. In short, students who more readily use technology for their studies are more likely than others to be deeply engaged with their work."

That last point is pretty powerful. Need to get the data replicated elsewhere as next stage. But as always, different people are different!

Crotchety article challenging advocates of open publishing, about the cost of storing, managing and distributing digital goods, Annoying tone, but some useful points to consider. "Even beyond just their power requirements, digital goods have particular traits that make them difficult to store effectively, challenging to distribute well, and much more effective when handled by paid professionals."

"The book is intended to help administrators gain a basic knowledge base, think critically about some key issues, and get some concrete suggestions for instructional and organizational uses of various digital technologies."

"Literacy and fluency have to do with our ability to use a technology to achieve a desired outcome in a situation using the technologies that are available to us."

"Digital literacy is not word processing or watching movies on an iPhone, but instead using technology to create, code and collaborate. In today's world, that necessarily includes the Web. Building a generation of young 'webmakers' is key to job creation, international competitiveness and engagement in civil society. In this webinar, Mozilla will talk about their work in this area to define key Web literacy skills, create pathways for innovative learning experiences around them and build a network of instructors and facilitators with a shared mission."

"mapping digital skills in Irish Higher Education"

The Scottish Government strategy for using digital technology to enhance learning & teaching.