The COVID-19 lockdown of educational institutions has thrown many of its participants into the cold water. While many of us managed to adjust with some or little effort a considerable number of educators and learners experience major difficulties in the shift.
Understanding the theory behind these experiences might help us improve individual learning experiences and reduce digitalization induced anxiety.
The concept of Digital Literacy offers a good starting point. Digital Literacy operationalizes the logic of language in understanding individual digital capabilities. We are not born digitally literate by nature, but rather the skill – like a language – is nurtured throughout our lives and heavily affected by our exposure to and experience with it. Digital Literacy develops over time and the earlier in life the basic logic is acquired – like grammar and vocabulary – the easier it is to become proficient. Acquiring digital skills later in life is often cumbersome, like some of us might have witnessed with our parents and grandparents.
While Digital Literacy provides a good starting point for understanding our ability to adjust to the current situation it does not capture the whole picture. Once the basic logic of digital literacy is internalized capabilities become localized around personal engagement and context. A good conceptualization of this notion is the Visitor and Resident Framework propagated by Lanclos, Phipps and White. The framework provides users with a tool to map their digital literacy for different digital applications across engagement dimensions (i.e. visitor to resident) and context dimensions (i.e. personal to professional). Across the engagement dimension visitors leave no social trace and use the application instrumentally (e.g. searching for information, reading information watching a videos), while residents leave a social trace and involves engagement with others (e.g. social media activities and joining in discussion). In the middle of the continuum one would look at closed groups, which are representative of an online classroom environment. On the context dimensions digital applications are located on the personal or institutional use of applications.
This framework helps to understand why some digital users might be highly engaged and literate in personal applications like social media for most students, but appear to face considerable difficulties in using educational technologies such as Moodle platforms, video lectures or online examination. Digital competency is highly contextualized around personal experiences and identities and this distinction needs to be taken into account.
Applying this logic to the learning context it makes sense to distinguish between curriculum work and continuous learning applications. Within an education curriculum (e.g. BSc, MSc) the population or learners is rather coherent in terms of the basic literacy and professional applications can be nurtured throughout the curriculum if planned well. In the continuous learning context, however, an even skillset cannot be assumed creating potential pitfalls when transferring teaching experiences and content from curriculum work.
