This document summarizes research into students' digital literacy practices. Focus groups and student journals showed that digital practices are complex, situated, and involve both human and non-human actors. Literacies occur across multiple domains and are mediated through diverse technologies. Defining digital literacies as skills ignores this complexity. Instead, educators should focus on helping students develop resilience, adaptability, and an orientation toward lifelong learning as technologies change.

1. Un-defining digital literacies: Image or
students’ day-to-day engagements text to
with technologies go here
Martin Oliver & Lesley Gourlay
Institute of Education, University of London
EdTech Conference 2012
NUI Maynooth
31st May 2012

2. Overview
1) Literacies as social practice
2) Literacies as situated practices
3) Literacies as distributed and diffuse
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3. Literacies as social practice
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4. Definitions of digital literacies
Digital literacy defines those capabilities which fit an
individual for living, learning and working in a digital
society.
(Beetham, 2010)
• Is having a definition “a convenient hypocrisy”?
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5. Conceptions of literacies
• Ethnographic research (Brice-Heath 1983,
Street 1984)
• Social practice not individual cognition
• Academic literacies (Lea & Street, 1998)
• Critique of cognitive, individual model
• Focus on meaning-making and texts
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6. Learning technology
Many theories of “learning” but not good explanation of
“technology”
Literature search
• Decade of journals in the field
• Only 10 articles in a decade that try to explain
“technology”
• Five of them about “affordances”

7. Technology “offers” (causes) or constrains
• A way of designing user agency out
• Appealing to designers who want users to behave
• Cf. Woolgar & Grint (1997) and “configuring the users” (an
STS take on the problem)
• Vendor rhetoric of technology “solutions”
Seeking approaches that don’t reduce ‘the social’ to a
‘command and control’ systems/engineering paradigm
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8. Literacies as situated practice
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9. IOE JISC project
2-year funded project
– http://diglitpga.jiscinvolve.org/
– Digital Literacies programme, 10 projects
1st year: student research
• Focus groups
• Longitudinal multimodal journalling
2nd year: implementation projects
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10. Methodology
Reflecting diversity, complexity etc
Data as close as possible to practices, not accounts of practices
Journalling as ethnographically informed data of
Artefacts – emphasis on experience over abstraction, sense of the
fine-grained day-to-day lived practices
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12. 12

13. What did the focus groups say about
situated practice?
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14. What do our students use?
Lots of things - many institutional, but also many that are not institutionally supported
• Office tools (primarily Microsoft, plus Google docs and Prezi)
• Institutional VLEs (Moodle and Blackboard)
• Email (institutional, personal and work-based)
• Synchronous conferencing services (Skype, Elluminate)
• Calendars (iCal, Google)
• Search engines and databases (including Google, Google Scholar, library databases,
professional databases such as Medline, etc),
• Social networking sites (Facebook, Academia.edu, LinkedIn) and services (Twitter)
• Image editing software (photoshop, lightbox)
• Endnote
• Reference works (Wikipedia, online dictionaries and social bookmarking sites such as
Mendeley)
• GPS services
• Devices (PCs at the institution and at home, laptops including MacBooks, iPhones, iPads,
Blackberries and E-book readers).
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15. “The student experience”
No evidence that the student experience is singular…
•Marked differences in experiences and priorities across the
four groups
•PGCE, MA students, PhD students, Online masters’ students
•Coping with whiteboards and staff room politics of access;
using the VLE to access materials; library databases; using
the VLE to create a sense of community (…and Skype behind
the scenes…)
•Professional, personal, study
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16. The sense of community is much stronger at my new school. People stay
at work later- at the old school everyone left early. And at the old
school we weren’t given any work space in the English department so
we had to work in the staff room but at the new one we have desks so
we really feel connected to the department. And its great because
everyone works at their desks and then for lunch they have ‘turn-in’
time when we all move our chairs away from our desks and eat
together in a circle.
(PGCE student)
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17. I could go into like Web of Knowledge, I could put that reference into
EndNote, I could then go and look it up through, do a direct link through
to [the University’s] holdings, find the article. But if I actually looked that
article up in the [the University’s] holdings, I then can't then pull it the
other way. And it’s like hang on a minute, why does it work in one
direction and not another, that just seems [unclear]. Then I've got,
something I've actually had up on my screen a moment before, I'm
having to type in by hand. I'm like why, why am I doing this? I don't
understand the logic behind why the pathways don't work both ways.
(PhD Student)
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18. Complexity: domains and devices
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19. Access, difference, convergence
Well, in my bedroom, on my bed, it's mainly my mobile and
going through my emails, travel information, whether on
Facebook, my mobile too. Then, um, and in the study
room, that would be my laptop and, um, laptop, that would
be Blackboard, research, entertainment.
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20. The only thing I struggle with […], is the issue of like keeping
your private life separate from your work life because I think
increasingly the two, you're being forced to kind of mush the
two together. Because like [Another Institution] used to have
its own email server and it would provide you with an email.
Now it’s provided by Gmail and it’s like everybody knows that
Gmail is the nosiest thing in the world and tracks absolutely
everything you do. And […] I'm a little bit uncomfortable with
the idea that my work email knows what shopping I do and,
you know what I mean? I just find the whole thing is starting
to get a little bit scary.
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21. Journalling case study: Yuki
Japanese, female in her 40s, MA student
For me the most important thing is portability, because I use
technologies, ICT, everywhere I go, anywhere I go. For example of
course I use some technologies, PCs and laptops and my iPad in the
IOE building, and in the IOE building I use PC, I use them in PC room,
in library, and for searching some data or journals. In the lecture room I
record my, record the lectures and taking memos by that.
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22. Print literacies
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23. Digital/digitised texts
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24. Non-human actors
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25. Domains
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26. 26

27. 27

28. Themes from the journals
• Complex, constantly shifting set of practices
• Permeated with digital mediation
• Strongly situated / contingent on the material
• Distributed across human /nonhuman actors
• Texts are restless, constantly crossing apparent
boundaries of human/nonhuman, digital/analogue, here/not
here, now/not now.
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29. Humans, and what they take to be their learning and social
process, do not float, distinct, in container-like contexts of
education, such a classrooms or community sits, that can
be sits, that can be conceptualised and dismissed as
simply a wash of material stuff and spaces. The things that
assemble these contexts, and incidentally the actions and
bodies including human ones that are part of these
assemblages, are continuously acting upon each other to
bring forth and distribute, as well as to obscure and deny,
knowledge. (Fenwick et al 2011)
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30. So, what might this mean for you?
Thinking differently about digital literacies
• Calling things “generic” and “transferable” just hides the complexity
• “Skills” understood as achievements that involve resources (physical,
digital) and people in specific places
…leading to new questions:
• Can we develop “resilience”: the capacity to cope when parts of these
network change or break?
• (Beetham, Exeter) Can we develop learners’ digital literacy repertoires?
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31. What might you need to think about?
What technologies are students using anyway?
• Do these help or hinder study?
• Can they learn to use them in this new context?
• Can you help them bring together or keep separate different parts of their
lives?
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32. What technologies are students required to use?
• What do they struggle with or get concerned about?
• Where and when do they do this? (Do you know?)
• Who helps them, inside or outside the institution? (…if anyone…)
• What happens when they struggle, or choose not to use them?
How can you help students to help each other?
• Can “resilient” coping strategies be described and shared?
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33. Revisiting the definitions
Digital literacy defines those capabilities which fit an individual for
living, learning and working in a digital society. (Beetham, 2010)
Taxonomic definitions or literacies or of attributes are doomed to failure
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34. Revisiting the definitions
A focus on orientations not skills and capabilities
• …agility, adaptability, resilience, tolerance of ambiguity, ability to
interweave institutional/non-institutional technologies, ability to work
across a range of physical, temporal, digital and analogue domains
• A situated account implies situated development, not monolithic
institutional programmes
If we want to develop digital literacies for life…
• Not giving learners something, but helping them to develop an unafraid
stance of constant learning
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35. Questions and comments?
http://diglitpga.jiscinvolve.org/
Institute of Education
University of London
20 Bedford Way
London WC1H 0AL
Tel +44 (0)20 7612 6000
Fax +44 (0)20 7612 6126
Email info@ioe.ac.uk
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Web www.ioe.ac.uk