Operationalising digital literacy #1: Wikileaks
This is the first in a planned series in attempting to operationalise the term ‘digital literacy’. Feel free to respond here, on your own blog or anywhere else you desire!
It’s Sunday morning, a great time to do some thinking and reflecting. Go and get a warm beverage and your thinking cap; this post is going to take half an hour of your time.
Step 1 (5 mins)
Watch this presentation by Tabetha Newman: Digital literacy literature review: from terminology to action (click Menu –> View Fullscreen for best results):
I think we can agree that Tabetha’s work provides a starting point from which we can start to align and move towards operationalising ‘digital literacy’. With that in mind, move to Step 2.
Step 2 (21 mins)
Listen to this recent RSA talk on The Future of Wikileaks. The whole thing, including Q&A, is an hour but the talk itself is only about 21 minutes.
Step 3 (variable)
Informed by what you’ve learned in Steps 1 and 2, how much ‘digital literacy’ do you think it takes to:
- Run Wikileaks?
- Be part of the Wikileaks network?
- Submit something to Wikileaks?
Answers in the comment section below. Please don’t answer these questions if you haven’t done steps 1 and 2 – you’d be missing the point. 🙂
1. To run it you’d need the full range – define, access, understand and evaluate, create and communicate. And you’d need to be able to do that all self-directed, so you’d be at the top end of both the process and the development axes.
2. To be part of the network, it would completely depend on your role, whether you were analysing the data, gathering it, communicating it. But I’d guess that again you’d have to follow some structured guidelines and it would be helpful to the rest of the network. if you’d got up to the point of understanding and evaluating.
3. To contribute something I think you’d need a reasonably low level of understanding the process – being able to access the network. I should imaging that developmentally you’d generally be in ‘open enquiry’ to self-determine your own outcomes; but I would also imagine that if you were disgruntled and motivated enough by the content of the leak that your general development could be as little as following low-level guidance.
What a FAB grid though for a framework of thinking about learning. Do you think it would be reasonable for me to use it to design a new ICT curriculum for my school?
Definitely! That’s what I mean about ‘operationalising’ it – putting it into practice. Would love to see the results.
Thanks for being the first to respond. :-)