Scaffolding my Digital Literacy

If I stand back and reflect on my learning journey during the past two weeks, there are two things that have stuck with me. One is the concept of digital literacy, and the other is scaffolding. Let me explain how both concepts have merged in my head.

While acquiring better digital literacy is one of my goals in this course, I have always put it down to technological enhancements to how  I position myself as a facilitator. I am still the central figure, and the digital world is just a medium I use. It is in the last two weeks of working with artists, doctors and educators that I am impressed with the notion that the medium is the message. I can choose to be part of the messaging if I want. Here the digital world is no longer just limited to technological enhancements accompanying me in class. Just as wording an idea is a core skill-set I have as a linguist, digital literacy offers another way forward to present my ideas. I employed words alone in the past, and now I employ an array that has promising potential. How I position myself with regards to the message is entirely dependent on the context, audience, and content.  In many ways, I am to be just part of the learning environment for students, not the focal point.

              Next, listening to the webinar last week on digital identities further allowed me to reframe my understanding of my place in the digital world. Digital literacy is no longer a simple binary division between a native and immigrant as suggested by (Creighton, 2018). Instead, the  digital world offers me opportunities to be a guest, host, student, teacher, learner and most of all a linguist.  My digital literacy journey is again dependent on the same variables as mentioned before-content, audience, and context. If anything, my understanding of my digital identity only reaffirms the idea that “I contain multitudes” as Walt Whitman once said in his poem “Song of Myself.”

I suggest here that the journey towards becoming more comfortable in the digital world was facilitated with plenty of scaffolding (Richardson et al., 2021). My understanding of scaffolding thus far was encased in a very literal interpretation— it is help with building a space, that is temporary and moveable. But what do you do when help is not available from a teacher? Is scaffolding then done by the self? How successful is it?  Is it a reflective process? When do you decide to move on to the next step? I was confronted with these questions when we were discussing our journey in the digital world in my group. It is here I heard different perspectives on the meaning of scaffolding both as a noun and as a verb. I have finally concluded that scaffolding in the digital world requires a reframing of my understanding of it.  Scaffolding doesn’t require an external teacher, a helper, a resource that guides students towards mastery. Instead scaffoldings are offered in the digital world that come in the form of different digital tools like  Pedlet, Miso or VoiceThread. Scaffoldings can also be actualised as “Clean questions” or “Scenario-based-learning.” Thus, scaffolding techniques need not be heavily dependent on a teacher but rather it is part of the journey-a means to an end.

              I am finally left with a small nagging fear.  What is left of my role as a teacher in this new digital space?  When you remove the “I” from the digital world and the scaffolding environment provided in the classroom (by me), then what is my role? Can I let go of the control I had in guiding the students in what I believe is the right way? I hope the next few weeks will help me answer this question and help assuage my fear.  

References

Creighton, T. B. (2018). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, Digital Learners: An International Empirical Integrative Review of the Literature. Education Leadership Review, 19(1), 132-140.

Richardson, J. C., Caskurlu, S., Castellanos-Reyes, D., Duan, S., Duha, M. S. U., Fiock, H., & Long, Y. (2021). Instructors’ conceptualization and implementation of scaffolding in online higher education courses. Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 34(1), 242-279. doi:10.1007/s12528-021-09300-3