Tag: digital literacy

Digital literacy, e-safety and donating to Japan

Posted on March 17, 2011 by Doug Belshaw

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.

Is digital literacy ‘in crisis’?

Posted on March 16, 2011 by Doug Belshaw

Sometimes, juxtaposition is all that’s required.

Bennett, et al. (2008) The ‘digital natives’ debate – a critical review of the evidence (BJET, 39:5, pp.775-786)

Cohen’s (1972) notion of a ‘moral panic’ is helpful in understanding the form taken by the digital natives debate. In general, moral panics occur when a particular group in society, such as a youth subculture, is portrayed by the news media as embodying a threat to societal values and norms. The attitudes and practices of the group are subjected to intense media focus, which, couched in sensationalist language, amplifies the apparent threat. So, the term ‘moral panic’ refers to the form the public discourse takes rather than to an actual panic among the populous. The concept of moral panic is widely used in the social sciences to explain how an issue of public concern can achieve a prominence that exceeds the evidence in support of the phenomenon (see Thompson,
1998).

In many ways,much of the current debate about digital natives represents an academic form of moral panic. Arguments are often couched in dramatic language, proclaim a profound change in the world, and pronounce stark generational differences. (p.782)

Susan Murphy, Digital Literacy Is In Crisis (2011):

The solution to this crisis begins with teachers, and this is where the gap widens even more. Teachers are in a terrible predicament, because they are in a position where they’re still trying to figure this stuff out themselves. The Web is still so young. None of us has more than 15 years of experience at it. The technology, trends, and philosophies behind the Web change at lightning speed. Teachers are simply not equipped to bridge the gap of digital literacy, because they have fallen into the gap.

(emphasis in original)

Why e-safety isn’t part of digital literacy (and never will be).

Posted on March 1, 2011 by Doug Belshaw

Increasingly, I’m realising that there are unsaid words that precede almost any statement involving a connotative element. What are those words?

Let me tell you a story…

Given the potential for almost any word in any language to be used metaphorically, storytelling is happening pretty much most of the time.

So here’s my story.

Digital literacy, despite the heated debate going on behind the relevant page at Wikipedia isn’t computer literacy. It isn’t media literacy either. And it’s certainly not e-safety.

Including e-safety as an input, as a constituent part of, digital literacy makes no sense at all. It’s like defining traditional (print) literacy by describing behaviour in libraries (or what you can do with a book). What lies behind this approach is the assumption that a collection of competencies makes a literacy, which isn’t true: a collection of competencies is a skillset. And one only has to refer to Searle’s Chinese Room argument to see the fallacy behind equating a skillset with any form of understanding.

No, e-safety is an output of digital literacy, something that flows out of it once an individual is fluent. Fluency is the top end of the literacy scale – and fluency is the result of practice. To divorce e-safety from practice, to conceive it as something that can be taught in isolation is ill-advised and, ultimately, futile.

So stop building your creepy treehouses, and start thinking holistically about literacy and education more generally. Avoid digital Taylorism, and start debating about what it is we’re trying to do here. If we’re truly trying to protect and educate our young people we need to know what it is we’re protecting them from, why we’re doing it, and the best ways of going about it.

Scaring people with statistics and horror stories perpetuates the wrong type of responses (e.g. blocking) and avoids the problem. Let’s tackle it head-on. Let’s start focusing on digital literacy.

Update: Fixed incorrect link.