The first two weeks of ONL221 has provided many opportunities to pause and reflect on my own profile as a digital learner and educator. Prior to diving deeper into the issues and academic literature on the topic of ‘digital literacy’, if I had to describe myself I would say that I was an ad hoc user of digital tools that was largely driven by metrics such as ease of use, convenience, simplicity and accessibility. My digital presence is driven largely by professional needs – what do I need to effectively teach and learn; rather than personal needs – what do I need to create a personal identity and presence online. I generally stick to a narrow set of digital tools and do not explore beyond these tools.
However, the discussions in my PBL group, the webinar with David White and the academic literature have prompted me to start thinking about how I can be more intentional in evolving my digital literacy: should I try and have a growth mind-set versus a “do what you can to survive” mindset? This post sets out how I propose exploring my digital literacy further and as the course progresses.
Defining “Digital Literacy”
In their guide – “Developing Digital Literacies” (2014) – JISC defines ‘digital literacy’ as:
“…those capabilities which fit an individual for living, learning and working in a digital society.”
There are a number of assumptions / ideas behind this definition that need unpacking. First, what is a ‘digital society’? Secondly, what does “fit” mean here? What level of ‘competency’ do we need to feel like we are ‘fit’ for a digital society? Thirdly, and finally, do we all share the same interests in getting to this point of digital literacy? Do we all feel we need to evolve these capabilities in order to ‘live’ as well as ‘learn, work’ in a digital society; or are we actually comfortable ring-fencing our ‘living’ space from our ‘learning and working’ spaces and focusing our efforts on enhancing digital literacy with respect to the latter? For the rest of this post, I want to focus on the second and third of these questions.
Before I turn to do so, I want to share some thoughts on the question of whether – irrespective of our individual contexts, motivations and personalities – should we nonetheless aspire to evolve our digital literacy levels? Prior to embarking on this course, I would have taken the position that I was at a desirable level of evolution: I was not intimidated by the digital environment and that it was completely alright that I was not a particularly dynamic and exciting digital user. However, having met educators from diverse backgrounds and digital profiles, I am provoked into thinking that there is much to explore out there in the digital environment and I would be compromising my capacity as a student and educator if I did not explore how I can grow and evolve. In the first webinar of ONL221 with David White, I learned about a whole host of new tools and applications (Padlet, Notion, Scrivener, Discord, Trello) and was inspired to start exploring and experimenting with these tools. While I may not embed all of them in my approaching to teaching and learning, it has opened my mind to embrace the idea that digital literacy does indeed provide new opportunities to enhance teaching, learning and my own research. It is with this spirit that I will proceed with the rest of this course. Having set out my starting point – enhancing digital literacy and comfort is a ‘good’ thing – I want to consider next two questions: (a) the question of ‘fit’ – how do we ‘fit’ better in a digital society; and (b) our interests and motivations in ‘fitting’ in.
What makes us “fit” for a digital society?
In fleshing out the definition of ‘digital literacy’, the JISC Guide fleshes out seven elements of ‘digital literacy’ or, as I like to think of it, seven ‘competencies’ that help to scaffold and break down the idea of digital literacy:
Beetham and Sharpe argue that digital literacy is an entirely developmental process – we start with having access and awareness and gradually develop skills, and then from that practices (where we consolidate our skills and adopt patterns and practices that we consider best achieve our objectives in engaging with the digital space); we culminate in having a digital identity that is grounded in our skills and practices.
Do we all share the same interests and motivations in becoming ‘digitally literate’?
Those researching digital literacy have, over time, developed a number of typologies for understanding different groups of digital users. The objective of these typologies is to articulate the different degrees of online engagement by different categories of users with a view to proposing that any scheme that aims at enhancing usage has to be tailored to these different groups of users.
In an article on online engagement, David S White and Alison Le Cornu take issue with prior typologies. In particular, they take issue with the model of ‘digital natives’ and ‘digital immigrants’ developed by Marc Prensky (“Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” in On the Horizon (MCB University Press, Vol.9, No.5, October 2001). In addition to the usual concerns with creating typologies (e.g. rigidity of categories, inflexibility and tendency to box individuals into a category), there are also concerns that the dichotomy drawn by Prensky tends to rely on ‘demographic’ features of users – most notably, age. Put simply, a ‘native’ is someone – typically younger – who is born in the digital environment and is completely at ease there; whereas a ‘immigrant’ is a newcomer to the same environment and who may manage to achieve some level of digital literacy but will never be completely at ease / fully competent). In responding to these criticisms, White / Le Cornu propose that a spectrum versus category-based typology is a more flexible tool and, in addition, we need to broaden the contextual factors (far beyond the demographic ones Prensky relies on) to better understand the different categories of digital users. Further, they argue that – unlike Prensky – there is no ceiling to how far we can go in progressing our digital literacy; how far we do is a product of how much we are motivated to do so. There are other complexities to the disagreement with Prensky, but for now I want to focus on the evolved ‘typology’ created by White / Le Corfu.
Their focus is on how we – as digital users – absorb digital tools and function differently depending on the context in which we are operating. We either operate as ‘residents’ or ‘visitors’. As residents, we view the digital as a ‘place’ with groups of friends and communities we embed ourselves in. We are happy to share information about ourselves freely and live a large part of our existence online; the digital space is, in fact, a large tool for maintaining and developing a digital identity. As ‘visitors’, on the other hand – the digital is not a ‘place’ but a set of ‘tools’ in the digital ‘garden shed’. We enter the garden shed on a needs-basis to utilise tools to further a particular task and we then leave the garden shed – leaving different degrees of trace of our identity as we do so. Where we are on this visitor-resident continuum will depend on the context in which we are operating – is it the institutional or personal space? Our motivation-level for behaving as a ‘visitor’ or ‘resident’ will vary depending on the context in which we are operating. Put diagramatically:
The blue rectangle in this image is there to symbolise the fact that whether we are visitors or residents in either the institutional or personal context will be a question of degree rather than an absolute measurement / categorisation. During the webinar with David White, participants were invited to consider how they would map themselves using this continuum:
What I learned from this exercise is that, in the personal sphere, I am a clear and distinct visitor – only engaging with known communities (family, close friends) and I remain a visitor in the institutional space because I am focused on tasks versus my professional digital identity. Going back to my earlier conclusion – evolving my digital literacy is a ‘good’ thing – I am keen to further explore my positioning in the visitor quadrant even in the professional space. While I have no motivation to move to the residential space in the personal context, I now do have a personal level of buy-in to transitioning to the residential space in the professional context. It is this that I will be focusing on as the course evolves.
Concluding Reflections
Writing this blog post has been extremely challenging. I am a lawyer by background and used to writing / reflecting on legal topics. Not only is the underlying academic literature relating to digital literacy distinct in various ways (methodologically, style / language in which its written, and the way questions are asked / answered) but it also relates to a subject-matter I am not confident about – the digital. However, reflecting on these questions has really inspired me to reflect and ask myself the difficult questions and I look forward to unpacking these further as the course evolves.