The American Library Association (ALA) defines digital literacy as “the ability to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, create, and communicate information, requiring both cognitive and technical skills.”
Digital literacy covers more than just send a text and post to social media, in education, it encompasses so much more. It involves acquiring specific skills when reading online text that may contain embedded resources such as hyperlinks, audio clips, graphs, or charts.
Ayhan (2016:42), digital literacy is a literacy where digital factors are central, and it develops over other literacies. This literacy is not a single form, rather it is an integrated structure with its sub- dimensions. Technological device knowledge, the ability to use them, and the formation of creative factors are key to digital literacy.
4 Principles of Digital Literacy
1. Comprehension
The first principle of digital literacy is simply comprehension–the ability to extract implicit and explicit ideas from a media.
2. Interdependence
This shows how one media connects with another. Due to the sheer abundance of media, it is necessary that media forms not simply co-exist, but supplement one another.
3. Social Factors
Sharing is no longer just a method of personal identity or distribution, but rather can create messages of its own. Who shares what to whom through what channels can not only determine the long-term success of the media, but can create organic ecosystems of sourcing, sharing, storing, and ultimately repackaging media.
4. Curation
This is the selection, organisation, and presentation of online content through various platforms. It entails the ability to understand the value of information and keep it in a way that makes it accessible and useful long-term (https://www.teachthought.com/literacy/4-principals-of-digital-literacy/).
It has been generally agreed that online participation plays an important role in successful learning but there have been different perceptions on how online participation may be conceptualised. According to Hrastinski (2008:4), researchers’ perception of the complexity of online participation varies as the following are six different ways in which online learner participation can be conceptualised were identified: participation as accessing e-learning environments, participation as writing, participation as quality writing, participation as writing and reading, participation as actual and perceived writing and participation as taking part and joining in a dialogue. Hrastinski concludes that, that sixth level conceptions of online participation have been increasingly common in recent years.
There are two approaches for studying online learner participation: (1) asynchronous and/or synchronous communication, and (2) quantitative and/or qualitative method. The first classification gives an indication of what types of communication that were examined while the second classification shows the types of approaches that underlie research (Hrastinski, 2008:4).
Most of the studies undertaken to describe how online participation is empirically studied favoured quantitative over qualitative method and asynchronous over synchronous communication (Hrastinski, 2008:6).
Reference list
Ayhan B, (2016) Digital Literacy
Hrastinski, S, (2008) “What is Online Participation and How may it be Studied in E-Learning Settings?”. ECIS 2008 Proceedings,34.
Terry Heick [Online]. Available at: https://www.teachthought.com/literacy/4-principals-of-digital-literacy/. [Accessed: 08 March 20].
