Month: November 2011

JISC Online Conference session on digital literacy (#jiscel11)

Posted on November 24, 2011 by Doug Belshaw

JISC Online Conference - Digital Literacy panel discussion

I’ve just been in an interesting panel discussion at the JISC Online Conference on the subject of ‘digital literacy’. The recording of the Elluminate session is available.

The session reinforced to me just how diverse people’s views on digital literacies are. Most new to the field make the assumption that digital literacy is singular and consists of basic skills in the digital realm. In effect, digital competency. Those more experienced in the field, such as Helen Beetham, talk of the importance of this baseline – the ‘ABC’ of digital literacy as she called it, but higher-level skills as well.

Helen talked about how difficult it can be for learners to know what it is that they need to know, and also how to express it. For example, they may be confident using blogs, wikis and social networking sites, but be extremely unsure as to what’s expected in the form of a 5,000-word essay. The problem comes because we lack a coherent approach: different people and organisations own different parts of the digital landscape.

Another panellist who ‘got it’ was Dave White. Happily, both Dave and Helen are expert consultants to the JISC Developing Digital Literacies programme I’m supporting! Dave expanded briefly upon his idea of Visitors and Residents but spent most of his time talking about his intriguing idea of there being a ‘Learning Black Market‘ in education. Students, he contends, develop their ‘user-owned’ literacies that are highly effective, but these are devalued or ignored by institutions. An example of this would be their use of Google searches and Wikipedia, which they are loathe to admit to because of uncertainties around where line around ‘plagiarism’ is drawn.

It was a very interesting session, with the 102-strong members of the backchannel having a conversation at the same time. Ewan McIntosh, for example, who’s giving the closing ‘crowdsourced’ keynote trying to make sense of the whole conference, asked how we all came across our digital literacy skills. It was, in effect, a rhetorical question, as we all reflected on the fact that they were primarily self- or peer-taught on a ‘need-to-know’ or ‘interest’ basis.

It certainly got me thinking about the best ways of developing the essential elements of digital literacies I’ve identified in my research and thesis.

An example of innovation being built upon standardization.

Posted on November 23, 2011 by Doug Belshaw

Illuminated manuscript

I’ve been reading Reinventing Knowledge: from Alexandria to the Internet over the last couple of days. It takes an interesting approach, looking at intellectual history through institutions rather than individuals: The Library, The Monastery, The University, The Republic of Letters, The Disciplines, The Laboratory.

After I mentioned my belief that innovation is (generally) built upon standardization in a blog post about the Guardian Innovation in Education event, some people asked me for examples. I’m happy to say the book provided one in the shape of the medieval monastery:

By no means the only rule for monasteries, nor the oldest, nor the most innovative, [The Benedictine Rule] nevertheless achieved authoritative status on acount of its simple practicality and realistic expectations of the average monk’s capacity for ascetic discipline. Crafted for spiritual use, tested by time and repetition, and propagated by anonymous scribes, it bears a certain resemblance to the Christian scriptures themselves. Adhering to such a text enabled communities of monks to survive and thrive desipte the personal quirks and transient lifespans of individual members. In Benedict’s ideals and their evelopment in practice we see how monastic time played upon cycles of days, weeks, and years, endlessly repeating, to ensure the survival and stability of the monastery and of learning itself. (p.56-7)

The author continues a couple of pages later:

The genius of the Rule lay in the recognition that monks needed a specific regimen to make this spiritual goal an attainable reality. It was one thing to declare the entirety of one’s life, every moment, was to be devoted to God, another to know precisely what to do during all the minutes that followed sunrise, day after day. (p.59)

We do, of course, have to be careful. As Cathy Davidson points out in her must-read book for educators Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn, your attention has to be on the right thing to start off with. Otherwise, you get what Clayton Christensen calls ‘custodial schooling’ with seat time trumping a focus upon learning gains.

The idea of a platform for innovation, I think, is sound. It doesn’t really matter what the socially-negotiated/accepted base consists of, just so long as there is one to build upon. The best examples I’ve seen are a school where there was a workflow for everything, and my current employers where we have a team-constructed wiki that serves as a knowledge repository.

Image CC BY bazylek100

Exploring digital literacies and illiteracies

Posted on November 23, 2011 by Doug Belshaw

I came across the work of Cristobal Cobo recently and, in particular, a TEDx talk he gave in Chile last year:

Invisible Learning -new literacies- and TEDxPlazaCibeles

View more presentations from Cristobal Cobo Romaní

What I like about this presentation is the way Cristobal, as I did in my thesis, focuses upon the importance of context. You can watch the video of him presenting over at his blog.

Interestingly, Cristobal is part of group publishing a book in 2012 called Knowmad Society. I certainly recognise myself in the definition of a ‘knowmad’ they take from Moravec (2008):

[…] a nomadic knowledge worker –that is, a creative, imaginative, and innovative person who can work with almost anybody, anytime, and anywhere. Industrial society is giving way to knowledge and innovation work. Whereas industrialization required people to settle in one place to perform a very specific role or function, the jobs associated with knowledge and information workers have become much less specific in regard to task and place. Moreover, technologies allow for these new paradigm workers to work either at a specific place, virtually, or any blended combination. Knowmads can instantly reconfigure and recontextualize their work environments, and greater mobility is creating new opportunities.