LET243 OL2

1. DIGITAL LITERACY
Augusto César Barroso Vidal

2. Concepts of digital literacy
 The ability to read and comprehend hypertext
(Bawden, 2001).
 According to him, those are four core
competencies of digital literacy:
• internet searching,
• hypertext navigation,
• knowledge assembly,
• content evaluation. (Bawden, 2008)

3. Concepts of digital literacy
 Digital Literacy is the awareness, attitude and
ability of individuals to appropriately use digital
tools and facilities to identify, access, manage,
integrate, evaluate, analyze and synthesize
digital resources, construct new knowledge,
create media expressions, and communicate
with others, in the context of specific life
situations, in order to enable constructive
social action; and to reflect upon this process.
(Martin, 2006: 19)

4. Concepts of digital literacy
 There are several degrees of digital literacy.
 Those skills come with practice. Just as
someone becomes literate in a language by
practicing it (speaking with someone in the
language, reading texts, listening, etc), a
individual will increase his/her proficiency with
digital tools as he/she use it.

5. Digital literacy in society
 “While a basic level of digital literacy would
include the ability to send e-mails, prepare
documents using computers, and search for
information on the Web, the competencies
required to fulfill this fundamental level of digital
literacy increase as the use of technology,
particularly mobile technology, expands. Thus,
being digitally literate today arguably includes
skills such as being able to use messaging
applications on smartphones and create digital
artefacts using applications such as WordPress
and Twitter” (Mohammadyari and Singh, 2014).

6. Digital literacy in society
 Therefore, we may say that different types of
people in a society possess different types of
digital literacies. Elderly people may have a
low proficiency at using digital tools as
compared to a younger group. One example is
the use of smartphones, which is a relatively
recent digital tool, and may itself as a barrier
for specific groups. The same could be
argued regarding casual users of digital media
and professional users.

7. Digital literacy in education: basic
competences for teachers and
learners
 “The research also showed that two fifths of
teachers of informatics subjects see their own
digital competencies at the level, which they
themselves consider as minimum acceptable
for teaching informatics subjects in primary
and lower-secondary school. One fifth of
teachers admit that their competencies do not
even reach the minimum acceptable level”
(Rambouseka, Štípeka and Vaňkováa, 2016)

8. Digital literacy in education: basic
competences for teachers and
learners
 Children are much more integrated to the digital
tools than the older generations that didn’t grew
up in the same environment. Therefore, students
may present higher levels of proficiency in media
tools than their teachers. This could translate in a
knowledge gap and a problem for the educational
system.
 It is important to invest in the training of teachers
and in the selection of the most relevant aspects
of the digital elements, being aware of the
transitional characteristic of those elements.

9. 21st century skills
 The ability to deal with digital interfaces, such as touch
screen tools, instead of physical interfaces, such as paper, is
a typical skill of the 21st century.
 This report from the European Commission demonstrates the
skills necessary to consider oneself as media literate:
• feeling comfortable with all existing media from newspapers to
virtual communities; actively using media through, inter alia,
interactive television, use of internet search engines or
participation in virtual communities, and better exploiting the
potential of media for entertainment, access to culture,
intercultural dialogue, learning and daily-life applications (for
instance, through libraries, podcasts);
• having a critical approach to media as regards both quality and
accuracy of content.
• using media creatively, as the evolution of media technologies
and the increasing presence of the internet as a distribution
channel(…)(European Commission, 2007)

10. Global impact of digital literacy
 The ability to be connected with the whole
world throughout the use of digital tools as a
form of language.
 The exchange of knowledge is made much
more easy if several individuals share the
same proficiency in the digital environment.
 Interchange of cultures, more people get to
know how other people live around the globe.

11. CONCLUSION
 Considering that the competences are
constantly changing, it is impossible to
consider someone fully digitally literate.
 Digital literacy depends heavily on social,
generational and professional factors.
 A certain degree of proficiency should be
aimed for the next generations, since our
society is considerably dependent on digital
interfaces.

12. Works cited:
 Bawden D (2001) Information and digital literacies: a review of
concepts. Journal of Documentation 57(2): 218–259.
 European Commission (2007) A European Approach to Media
Literacy in the Digital Environment. Available (consulted July 2009)
at: http://ec.europa.eu/avpolicy/media_literacy/docs/com/en.pdf
 Koltay, Tibor. "The Media and the Literacies: Media Literacy,
Information Literacy, Digital Literacy." Media, Culture & Society 33.2
(2011): 211-21. Web.
 Martin A (2006) Literacies for the digital age. In: Martin A and
Madigan D (eds) Digital Literacies for Learning. London: Facet, 3–
25.
 Mohammadyari, Soheila, and Harminder Singh. "Understanding the
Effect of E-learning on Individual Performance: The Role of Digital
Literacy." Computers & Education 82 (2015): 11-25. Web.
 Rambousek, Vladimir, Jiri Stipek, and Petra Vankova. "Contents of
Digital Literacy from the Perspective of Teachers and
Pupils." Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 217 (2016):
354-62. Web.