Digital literacy, e-safety and donating to Japan

At the end of the day it is a blog post which exists to encourage people to buy anti-virus products. And yet, an article with the title Criminals Exploiting Japan’s Tragedy: A Chance to Teach Digital Literacy which does not go on to address digital literacy even once serves to illustrate a point.

As argued elsewhere, e-safety (which, ultimately, is the focus of the article) is an output of digital literacy, not an input. There is no course that an individual can take that would teach them to be completely ‘safe’ online. Immersion and a the ability to critically ‘read’ online is key. As in life offline, scams and deceptions evolve as they are practices originating in human thought and action.

If e-safety is an output then digital literacy as a concept needs to explicitly address the ‘critical’ element of literacy involved in reading and writing online. There is, however, no ‘body of knowledge’ or skills that can be packaged up and distributed as cyber castor oil.