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Developing our digital literacies: the imperative
The document discusses the concept of digital literacy, emphasizing its broader definition beyond mechanical skills to include socially and culturally situated practices. It explores how individuals develop their digital literacies, the importance of being digitally literate in educational environments, and the need for educators to lead in cultivating these skills. The document highlights the necessity for confidence and agility in adapting to the digital age and the role of context in shaping digital literacy practices.
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Developing our digital literacies: the imperative
- 1. Developing our digitalliteracies: the imperative Dr. Rhona Sharpe Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development Changing the Learning Landscape, 29 May 2013
- 2. 1. What isdigital literacy? 2. How do people develop their digital literacies? 3. What does it mean to be a digitally literate staff and educational developer? 4. Why should we care?
- 3. Is she digitallyliterate?
- 4. Is he digitallyliterate?
- 6. Definitions: literacy “The useof the term literacy implies a broader form of education about media that is not restricted to mechanical skills or narrow forms of functional competence. It suggests a more rounded, humanistic conception’ (Buckingham, 2007)
- 7. ‘Literacy’ implies socially andculturally situated practices, often highly dependent on the context in which they are carried out. Beetham & Oliver (2010)
- 8. The functional access,skills and practices necessary to become a confident, agile adopter of a range of technologies for personal, academic and professional use https://wiki.brookes.ac.uk/display/slidacases/Oxford+Brookes At Oxford Brookes University, digital and information literacy is defined as ..
- 10. I’m not afraidto use it … I guess that’s the difference. I’m not afraid to just go explore it
- 11. Confident, agile adopters Thestaff are asking us to do things like, "how do we integrate Twitter with this?" and, okay, I don't know, gimme five minutes and I'll go and find out. And that's how I've always worked.… I will go away and make myself an expert in that field and then come back and pass on that knowledge, enable other people to go and use that software (InstePP ePioneer 2, JISC cluster group Sep 2012).
- 12. 1. What isdigital literacy? 2. How do people develop their digital literacies? 3. What does it mean to be a digitally literate staff and educational developer? 4. Why should we care?
- 13.
- 14. Socially and culturallysituated practices are often highly dependent on context
- 15. Socially and culturallysituated practices are often highly dependent on context • Personalised uses of technology, • developed through interactions with others, • in response to some need. Littlejohn, Beetham & McGill (forthcoming)
- 17. Encourage personalised uses of technology… e.g.OU Learning Design Tools www.open.ac.uk/blog s/OULDI/
- 18. Provide ways of sharingand networking … e.g. lamscommunity.org Dalziel (20130
- 19. Contextualising support for the disciplines e.g.mapping the graduate attributes
- 20. What does itmean to be digitally literate in . . .? Use online databases to conduct systematic reviews. Analyse data in Excel to produce scientific reports. Maintain electronic patient care records appropriately. Evaluate the role of assistive technologies in advancing health and social care practice. Health and life sciences
- 21. What does itmean to be digitally literate in . . .? Use relevant software to solve complex automotive engineering problems. Work with models that simulate the behaviour of the physical world. Produce high quality output using the latest software tools. Technology and engineering
- 22. 1. What isdigital literacy? 2. How do people develop their digital literacies? 3. What does it mean to be a digitally literate staff and educational developer? 4. Why should we care?
- 23. Ferrari, A. (2012)Digital competence in practice: an analysis of frameworks. JRC Technical Report. EU.
- 24. Contextualising digital literacyfor our own discipline: some ideas • Facilitation of online communities
- 25. Contextualising digital literacyfor our own discipline: some ideas • Facilitation of online communities • Working in an open academic environment Roberts, G. (2013)
- 26. Contextualising digital literacyfor our own discipline: some ideas • Facilitation of online communities • Working in an open academic environment • Productive use of learning design tools Conole, G. (2013)
- 27. Contextualising digital literacyfor our own discipline: some ideas • Facilitation of online communities • Working in an open academic environment • Productive use of learning design tools • Digital scholarship
- 28. 1. What isdigital literacy? 2. How do people develop their digital literacies? 3. What does it mean to be a digitally literate staff and educational developer? 4. Why should we care?
- 29. Why should wecare? • People who will thrive in the digital age will need the confidence and agility to respond to complex and changing circumstance.
- 30. Why should wecare? • People who will thrive in the digital age will need the confidence and agility to respond to complex and changing circumstance. • The powerful influence of context means that we, the teachers, should take the lead in developing our learners and ourselves.
- 31. Why should wecare? • People who will thrive in the digital age will need the confidence and agility to respond to complex and changing circumstance. • The powerful influence of context means that we, the teachers, should take the lead in developing our learners and ourselves. • With our expertise in learner development, should be at the forefront of providing opportunities for people to develop and share their personal practices for using technology.
- 32. References Beetham, H. &Oliver, M. (2010) The changing practices of knowledge and learning, in R. Sharpe, H. Beetham & S. de Freitas, Rethinking Learning for a Digital Age, Routledge. London & New York. Benfield, G. (2012) InstePP Evaluation report. Oxford Brookes Unversity. Oxford. Buckingham, D. (2007) Beyond Technology: Children’s learning in the age of digital media. Polity Press. Cambridge. Conole, G. (2013) Tools and resources to guide practice in H.Beetham & R.Sharpe (eds) Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age. 2nd Ed. Routledge. London and New York. Dalziel, J. (2013) The LAMS Community: Building communities of designers, in H.Beetham & R.Sharpe (eds) Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age. 2nd Ed. Routledge. London and New York. Littlejohn, A., Beetham, H. & McGill, L. (forthcoming) Learning at the digital frontier: a review of digital literacies in theory and practice. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning. Roberts, G. (2013) OOCs for the rest of us. Presentation to ELESIG Symposium, March 2013. Available at elesig.net Weller, M. (2011) The digital scholar: how technology is transforming scholarly practice. Bloomsbury. London.
Editor's Notes
- #2 LOGIN to WIKIhttp://www.heacademy.ac.uk/events/detail/2013/29_May_CLL_Aston
- #4 This is just access to tech for entertainmentNot for our purposes because not academically relevant skillshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoVNBfPEQu8
- #5 http://legoscratch.wordpress.com/2013/02/20/chapter-3/11 year old boys’ blogComposed on ipod touch withimovie, youtube and wordpress appsIs he digitally literate?Is using technology in purposeful way?But this is just media literacy surely? Not doing anything different, just posting it online
- #6 Are they digitally literate?Getting closerUsing tech to do things differentlyAnd talking and sharing in order to improve their practice. using their own tech, in their own personal ways, no one right way of doing it
- #7 This is important, it is a holistic view(anyone who remembers the JISC learner experience studies (2004-2009) will remember how important that holistic view is. That is, DL is broader than IT, media or information literacy (terms that have been around a while), and indeed subsumes these terms. EshaAlkalai (2004) described DL as ‘a survival skill in a digital era’. It’s about the era we live in and the choices we have. For example, an important part of DL is knowing when to use a non-digital source or tool.So I’m not going to talk about lists of competencies and the such, although I have got some examples of these photocopied for you to help with this afternoon’s activity to build a professional development framework for our community of staff and educational developers.
- #8 If you are interested in the term ‘literacy’ I’d refer you to this book, and ch. 11 particularly.
- #9 This notion of the agile adopter stems from work conducted by Jane Seale and others as part of the LEXDIS project who talked about the importance of ‘digital agility’ of disabled learners. They were characterised by Being extremely familiar with technologyUsing a wide range of strategiesHaving high levels of confidence in their own ability to use technologySo, do we know any digitally agile students?
- #10 https://wiki.brookes.ac.uk/display/instepp/Google+TubesThese are a couple of epioneersfrom the JISC INstePP project based at Brookeswhich is justcomingtoan end in July. For me, this is getting even closer towhat I think of as digitallyliterate.For me digital literacy is aboutcreativeappropriation, agile adoption, digital agility…. whateveryou want to call it.
- #11 https://wiki.brookes.ac.uk/display/instepp/Google+TubesThese are a couple of epioneersfrom the JISC INstePP project based at Brookeswhich is justcomingtoan end in July. For me, this is getting even closer towhat I think of as digitallyliterate.For me digital literacy is aboutcreativeappropriation, agile adoption, digital agility…. whateveryou want to call it.
- #12 In other words, in a multiplicity of ways some of the existing ePioneers exemplify the Oxford Brookes digital and information literacy graduate attribute, being ‘confident, agile adopter(s) of a range of technologies for personal, academic and professional use’. It is this confidence and agility, rather than specific knowledge of software or devices, that is of greatest value to the project and to developing the digital literacies of others. The ePioneers suggested that as far as possible supplementary ePioneer training on how to use various digital tools should be made available online so that ePioneers can ‘do all the training in their own time and then in their e-portfolio tick off the training when it's done’ (ePioneer 1, 14 Sep 2012).
- #13 Now we are getting into territory where we know a lot less about what’s going on..I’m not drawing any distinction here between staff and students. I’m just going to start talking about ‘people’.
- #14 I showed you this model earlier, and Liz Bennet is going to say some more about it so I won’t go into any detail the important thing to note is that it is about moving on from AccessSkillsPractices identityThe bit of this I want us to think about today
- #15 We said DL was a socially and culturally situated practice …Such practices are typically personal and flexible and developed in response to situational need. Does this mean that rather than teaching people to use technology, we should be encouraging them to develop their own ways of using technology to meet a particular need they have?Well yes. This suggests that in order to move people beyond Skills (I CAN), we should be thinking more about the triggers that encourage the development of practices (I DO). I’m going to suggest 3 ways of thinking about how to support PEOPLE (including ourselves here today) to develop digital literacy:Using technology to met a particular needEncouraging informal learningContextualising your definitions/objectivesThen hopefully you can use these 3 principles when you come to developing a framework for us this afternoon, after you’ve heard from a whole heap more examples.
- #16 We said DL was a socially and culturally situated practice …Such practices are typically personal and flexible and developed in response to situational need. Does this mean that rather than teaching people to use technology, we should be encouraging them to develop their own ways of using technology to meet a particular need they have?Well yes. This suggests that in order to move people beyond Skills (I CAN), we should be thinking more about the triggers that encourage the development of practices (I DO). So, knowing this, how can we support PEOPLE (including ourselves here today) to develop digital literacy? I suggest.Using technology to met a particular needEncouraging informal learningContextualising your definitions/objectivesThen hopefully you can use these 3 principles when you come to developing a framework for us this afternoon, after you’ve heard from a whole heap more examples.
- #17 Here’s a good example…Reference Me, developed by students in response to a need, shared informally.
- #18 Let’s think of something more relevant to supporting practitioners like… Learning Design.If we know that practices are developed in response to need so choosing your trigger is going to be important if you want practices to applied in certain contexts. So, triggers for developing staff digital literacies might be:‘using digital technology to design and develop study programmes and modules using learning design tools (as in the OU definition and staff development framework)There is a problem with digital literacy being a socially situated practice, and being so context specific, and that is that it seems that transferring capabilities developed in one context to another is more problematic than we thought. So important to develop the practice in the context you want it to be used.
- #19 If we know that digital literacy is developed through informal learning, might be important to provide ways of sharing and networking our use of technology e.g.The LAMS community created six years ago is still active and is fundamentally different from other online repositories that might superficially look similarWithin the LAMS Community the focus has been on creating a community space in which barriers to exploiting Learning Designs are removed and sharing amongst teachers is fostered. James finds that teachers value advice on versioning generic templates for their discipline and the opportunity to share designs within a closed community of close colleaguesthe sharing and reuse of Learning Designs could be facilitated by supporting teachers to combine generic designs with methods and content that meet the needs of their specific discipline communities.
- #23 I’m not drawing any distinction here between staff and students.
- #24 All agree? Are these statements enough?Probably not, in fact the 2012 European Commission report on expert’s view of digital competence, starts from the premise that educators require more clarity from such definitions.
- #29 I’m not drawing any distinction here between staff and students.