Now that we’ve finally finished our digital literacy unit, I finally have some real thoughts on digital literacy that came from watching how we worked as a group. Below are my digital literacy tips:
- Come up with a straightforward file naming convention for your documents that clearly communicates some sort of version number
- Purchase cloud storage, install it on all your devices and use it religiously. Don’t keep any files offline and definitely don’t ever store a critical copy of something on removable storage (i.e. USB/thumb drive). The metric for success here is you could lose all of your digital devices and yet not lose any files. For example, if your plane crashed, would you feel that you needed to risk your life to retrieve your laptop from the overhead storage? Or would you not give it a second thought?
- Once you get comfortable with cloud storage you should reduce the number of times you email documents and share and edit versions on the cloud.
- Never delete anything. Make some obvious backup folders and put all old versions in there. Never ever delete anything. Storage space is nominally infinite and free.
- Purchase a professional PDF editor/creator. It’s worth the money 1000 times over.
- If you are making figures (still pictures), whenever possible, use the Portable Network Graphics (.png) file format. Its compatible with all programs, new and old, and even though it’s a lossy file format, it enables ~ lossless representation of text with none of the artifacts seen in, e.g. JPG. PNG is also about as space efficient as JPG.
- Related to the previous point, vectorized graphics should be avoided unless you are an advanced end user. Especially if you use Microsoft products. They don’t play well with most standard document editors.
- There is a youtube demonstration video for everything you want to figure out. Keep searching until you find it.
- Install a second monitor on your computer. The productivity increase will be more than a factor of 2. You’d be surprised how much time is consumed by switching between windows. Two monitors can, in some instances, eliminate window switching for most tasks.
- If you do academic writing, get a reference manager. Don’t ever insert references manually.
These tips are specific to the computer usage aspect of digital literacy. The computer is supposed to reduce mundane work not increase it and I believe that the above reduces a significant volume of busy work. Working smarter, not harder equates to literacy.
My own digital literacy recommendations