Dave White writes:
Social media platforms, with their inherent hyper-connectivity require the user to hold highly complex multi-dimensional maps of them as social spaces, with many thresholds of differing permeability. It’s a long way from closing-the-front-door type methods of creating privacy boundaries. Some people are very skilled at managing the ‘edges’ of these social maps and manage their digital identities with great skill and to great effect. The rest of us have come to expect occasional moments of disjuncture.
I would argue that our notions of the public and the private don’t yet account for the width of these social thresholds or for the speed at which they can shift. We constantly negotiate the boundaries between the public and the private but we have an expectation that these boundaries, while moving, will remain sharp. The web and especially social media platforms defocus our understanding of these boundaries. Our ability to map and remap our relationship with these social thresholds is a key form of digital literacy, and possibly a new life-skill (if I can call it that).
Dave brings up an important element of digital literacy here: the ability to negotiate multiple spaces, some purely digital and some blended. This will inevitably involve shifts, even subtle ones, in the way that an individual projects themselves into that space. The boundary between this as a ‘literacy’ (reading/writing oneself) and a life-skill is itself blurred, I would suggest.
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. 🙂
I’m currently in the latter stages of my Ed.D. thesis focusing on the concept of ‘digital literacy’. It’s been a long haul – 6 years (spanning 4 jobs, 2 supervisors, and the birth of 2 children) working part-time in a quickly-moving digital world and, to be honest, I’m rather glad it’s coming to an end.
One of the reasons I’m glad that I’ll finish my doctoral thesis this year is that it’s clear just how much we need some alignment and operationalisation around the term ‘digital literacy’ rather than the endless squabbles, petty niggling and swamping of agendas by large organizations. I outlined these problems in 2009 and, unfortunately, they haven’t improved any. The fact that we’re still debating what is meant by the traditional term ‘literacy’ says a lot about how far we’re able to get on with operationalising notions of ‘digital literacy’ in the current climate. I’ll be explaining my notion notion of a ‘trajectory of ambiguity’ in an upcoming journal article: discussions of ‘digital literacy’, I believe, have become mired in endless debates half-way through this trajectory.
During my studies I’ve read countless reports and watched a myriad of presentations claiming (or at least assuming) some kind of authority when explaining what constitutes digital literacy. Many of these elide at least two agendas – usually e-safety or media literacy – with almost all of them missing the main point: digital literacy isn’t the ‘aftermath’ of literacy at all.
We don’t need to be told what digital literacy is, we need to discuss, build consensus, start aligning around a reasonable definition. Granted, there might be a difference in emphasis here and there, but only through such alignment will we able to start operationalising the concept of ‘digital literacy’ and use it for the benefit of learners.
And ulimately, after all the academic churning and grandstanding, isn’t that what it’s all about?
Image CC BY-NC Pulpulox !!!
