Tag: digital literacy

Meeting with Ed.D. thesis supervisor: restructuring

Posted on October 19, 2010 by Doug Belshaw

Last night I had a Skype conversation with Steve Higgins, my Ed.D. thesis supervisor at Durham University, for the first time in a few months. As I half-expected when I set myself the challenge, a deadline of 1st January 2011 is going to be pretty much unachievable now as I’m only 34,000 words into a 60,000 word thesis. That being said, Easter 2011 is looking good.

I find it useful to record our Skype conversations to go back through at my leisure. I haven’t done that yet – but I did capture the main points of our conversation via the Skype chat window. Here’s the highlights:

Other people’s work

As long as I acknowledge them, I can get other people to draw what I can only describe. Whilst I’ve made an attempt at representing what I discuss in diagrammatic form, there’s certain conventions and methods that I’m just not familiar with. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to afford to commission someone, especially given that I want to publish my thesis as a book.

Adjectives & verbs

Steve said something which, although he’s mentioned it before, struck a chord with me. He stated his belief that with ‘digital literacy’ the adjective and the verb seem to be the wrong way around. That is to say that ‘digital’ is the modifier for ‘literacy’ when it should be vice-versa. This led to a conversation about the final two chapters of my thesis before the conclusion. I intend to show that ‘digital literacy’ – and even ‘new literacies’ are too ambiguous to be nailed-down for all time. Instead, we should focus on notions of ‘digitality’ or similar.

Structure of thesis

Most theses, or so I’m led to believe, contain an introduction, followed by a methodology followed by a literature review, explication of points, and a conclusion. Not mine. As I’m writing a philosophical, non-empirical yet vocational doctoral thesis a slightly different format is required. As I began to explain in Ed.D. thesis restructure, I’m going to situate my methodology section almost half-way through my thesis, using it as a lever or a lens through which to focus the rest of my thesis. As for the literature review, this will be in (at least) four parts:

History of traditional (print) literacy
The history of digital literac(ies)
New Literacies
Policy documents (digitality)

That should keep things interesting. 🙂

Conclusion

Usually, as with most people writing something lengthy, I’d decide on my conclusion and then work backwards. That’s not entirely possible given the constant state of flux my thesis is in. As befitting Pragmatism, I’m making tentative conclusions. At the moment I’m given to concluding that the process (i.e. the inquiry) of notions surrounding ‘digital literacy’ and the like is at least as important as the resultant definition. In fact, I’m leaning more 70/30 in favour of process over product.

Steve quoted Douglas Adams at me. If this quotation doesn’t end up in my thesis, then you know something has gone horribly wrong:

We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!

Awesome.

Image CC BY pshutterbug

Ed.D. thesis restructure

Posted on October 17, 2010 by Doug Belshaw

As I mentioned last week in How not to write a thesis, mine isn’t the usual method by which you’d go about writing a doctoral thesis. Normally you’d read books like How to get a PhD and keep your findings to yourself until submission. I, on the other hand, have shared my findings at dougbelshaw.com/thesis since pretty much the beginning and have kept the structure fluid throughout.

Now that I’ve written more than half of it, and given that I’ve got my first Skype meeting with my thesis supervisor in months soon, now’s the time to pin down a title and structure. So here an attempt:

What is ‘digital literacy’? A Pragmatic investigation.

Introduction
Problematising traditional (print) literacy
The history of ‘digital literacy’
The ambiguities of ‘digital literacy’
Methodology
New Literacies: a solution?
But is it ‘literacy’?
Digitality as policy
Conclusion
Bibliography

In a sense, of course, I’ll never be finished with this thesis. There’ll just be a time at which it’s advisable to submit (or they pry it from my RSI-riddled hands…) :-p

Moving beyond ’21st century skills’

Posted on June 16, 2010 by Doug Belshaw

In responding to the radical change in working life that are currently under way, we need to tread a careful path that provides students with the opportunity to develop skills for access to new forms of work through learning the new language of work. But at the same time, our role as teachers is not simply to be technocrats. It is not our job to produce docile, compliant workers. Students need also to develop the capacity to speak up, to negotiate, and to be able to engage critically with the conditions of their working lives.

The above was written 10 years ago in a book entitled Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the ideas contained in the quotation; in fact, they form the bedrock of what some have been pushing as ’21st century skills’.

But it’s time to change the record that’s stuck on repeat.

It’s 2010. The idea of the ‘digital native’ turned out to be a myth; it’s dawning on us that even the idea of a ‘digital literacy’ is too ambiguous to be of much use. We’re in a post-Second Life brave new world.

So what can we do?

Move on. Sounds easy in theory, but what about in practice? Here’s 5 suggestions, which should ideally be undertaken sequentially:

Debate the purpose of education. Just what exactly are we trying to achieve?
Make explicit core competencies. The Norwegian model looks interesting.
Invest in design. Never mind ‘functional specifications’, focus on reducing needless friction – in everything from timetabling to technology.
Promote flexibility. It’s the watchword of our era. Let’s divorce schools from their daycare/babysitting role.
Recognise context. What works for one educational instution can’t be replicated exactly elsewhere.

It’s not good talking about ’21st century education’. We’re 10 years into it. :-p