1. Developing our digital literacies:
the imperative
Dr. Rhona Sharpe
Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development
Changing the Learning Landscape, 29 May 2013
2. 1. What is digital literacy?
2. How do people develop their digital
literacies?
3. What does it mean to be a digitally
literate staff and educational developer?
4. Why should we care?
6. Definitions: literacy
“The use of the term literacy implies a
broader form of education about media that
is not restricted to mechanical skills or
narrow forms of functional competence. It
suggests a more rounded, humanistic
conception’
(Buckingham, 2007)
7. ‘Literacy’ implies
socially and culturally
situated practices,
often highly dependent
on the context in which
they are carried out.
Beetham & Oliver (2010)
8. The functional access, skills and practices
necessary to become a confident, agile
adopter of a range of technologies for
personal, academic and professional use
https://wiki.brookes.ac.uk/display/slidacases/Oxford+Brookes
At Oxford Brookes
University, digital and
information literacy is
defined as ..
9.
10. I’m not afraid to use
it … I guess that’s
the difference. I’m
not afraid to just go
explore it
11. Confident, agile adopters
The staff are asking us to do things like, "how do we
integrate Twitter with this?" and, okay, I don't know,
gimme five minutes and I'll go and find out. And that's
how I've always worked.… I will go away and make
myself an expert in that field and then come back and
pass on that knowledge, enable other people to go and
use that software
(InstePP ePioneer 2, JISC cluster group Sep
2012).
12. 1. What is digital literacy?
2. How do people develop their digital
literacies?
3. What does it mean to be a digitally
literate staff and educational developer?
4. Why should we care?
15. Socially and culturally situated practices
are often highly dependent on context
• Personalised uses of technology,
• developed through interactions
with others,
• in response to some need.
Littlejohn, Beetham & McGill (forthcoming)
20. What does it mean to be digitally literate in . . .?
Use online databases to
conduct systematic reviews.
Analyse data in Excel to
produce scientific reports.
Maintain electronic patient
care records appropriately.
Evaluate the role of assistive
technologies in advancing
health and social care practice.
Health and life
sciences
21. What does it mean to be digitally literate in . . .?
Use relevant software to solve
complex automotive
engineering problems.
Work with models that
simulate the behaviour of the
physical world.
Produce high quality output
using the latest software tools.
Technology and
engineering
22. 1. What is digital literacy?
2. How do people develop their digital
literacies?
3. What does it mean to be a digitally
literate staff and educational developer?
4. Why should we care?
23. Ferrari, A. (2012) Digital competence in practice: an
analysis of frameworks. JRC Technical Report. EU.
25. Contextualising digital literacy for
our own discipline: some ideas
• Facilitation of online
communities
• Working in an open
academic environment
Roberts, G. (2013)
26. Contextualising digital literacy for
our own discipline: some ideas
• Facilitation of online
communities
• Working in an open
academic environment
• Productive use of
learning design tools
Conole, G. (2013)
27. Contextualising digital literacy for
our own discipline: some ideas
• Facilitation of online
communities
• Working in an open
academic environment
• Productive use of
learning design tools
• Digital scholarship
28. 1. What is digital literacy?
2. How do people develop their digital
literacies?
3. What does it mean to be a digitally
literate staff and educational developer?
4. Why should we care?
29. Why should we care?
• People who will thrive in the digital age will
need the confidence and agility to respond to
complex and changing circumstance.
30. Why should we care?
• People who will thrive in the digital age will
need the confidence and agility to respond to
complex and changing circumstance.
• The powerful influence of context means that
we, the teachers, should take the lead in
developing our learners and ourselves.
31. Why should we care?
• People who will thrive in the digital age will need
the confidence and agility to respond to
complex and changing circumstance.
• The powerful influence of context means that
we, the teachers, should take the lead in
developing our learners and ourselves.
• With our expertise in learner development,
should be at the forefront of providing
opportunities for people to develop and share
their personal practices for using technology.
32. References
Beetham, H. & Oliver, M. (2010) The changing practices of knowledge and
learning, in R. Sharpe, H. Beetham & S. de Freitas, Rethinking Learning
for a Digital Age, Routledge. London & New York.
Benfield, G. (2012) InstePP Evaluation report. Oxford Brookes Unversity.
Oxford.
Buckingham, D. (2007) Beyond Technology: Children’s learning in the age of
digital media. Polity Press. Cambridge.
Conole, G. (2013) Tools and resources to guide practice in H.Beetham &
R.Sharpe (eds) Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age. 2nd Ed. Routledge.
London and New York.
Dalziel, J. (2013) The LAMS Community: Building communities of designers,
in H.Beetham & R.Sharpe (eds) Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age.
2nd Ed. Routledge. London and New York.
Littlejohn, A., Beetham, H. & McGill, L. (forthcoming) Learning at the digital
frontier: a review of digital literacies in theory and practice. Journal of
Computer Assisted Learning.
Roberts, G. (2013) OOCs for the rest of us. Presentation to ELESIG
Symposium, March 2013. Available at elesig.net
Weller, M. (2011) The digital scholar: how technology is transforming
scholarly practice. Bloomsbury. London.
Hinweis der Redaktion
LOGIN to WIKIhttp://www.heacademy.ac.uk/events/detail/2013/29_May_CLL_Aston
This is just access to tech for entertainmentNot for our purposes because not academically relevant skillshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoVNBfPEQu8
http://legoscratch.wordpress.com/2013/02/20/chapter-3/11 year old boys’ blogComposed on ipod touch withimovie, youtube and wordpress appsIs he digitally literate?Is using technology in purposeful way?But this is just media literacy surely? Not doing anything different, just posting it online
Are they digitally literate?Getting closerUsing tech to do things differentlyAnd talking and sharing in order to improve their practice. using their own tech, in their own personal ways, no one right way of doing it
This is important, it is a holistic view(anyone who remembers the JISC learner experience studies (2004-2009) will remember how important that holistic view is. That is, DL is broader than IT, media or information literacy (terms that have been around a while), and indeed subsumes these terms. EshaAlkalai (2004) described DL as ‘a survival skill in a digital era’. It’s about the era we live in and the choices we have. For example, an important part of DL is knowing when to use a non-digital source or tool.So I’m not going to talk about lists of competencies and the such, although I have got some examples of these photocopied for you to help with this afternoon’s activity to build a professional development framework for our community of staff and educational developers.
If you are interested in the term ‘literacy’ I’d refer you to this book, and ch. 11 particularly.
This notion of the agile adopter stems from work conducted by Jane Seale and others as part of the LEXDIS project who talked about the importance of ‘digital agility’ of disabled learners. They were characterised by Being extremely familiar with technologyUsing a wide range of strategiesHaving high levels of confidence in their own ability to use technologySo, do we know any digitally agile students?
https://wiki.brookes.ac.uk/display/instepp/Google+TubesThese are a couple of epioneersfrom the JISC INstePP project based at Brookeswhich is justcomingtoan end in July. For me, this is getting even closer towhat I think of as digitallyliterate.For me digital literacy is aboutcreativeappropriation, agile adoption, digital agility…. whateveryou want to call it.
https://wiki.brookes.ac.uk/display/instepp/Google+TubesThese are a couple of epioneersfrom the JISC INstePP project based at Brookeswhich is justcomingtoan end in July. For me, this is getting even closer towhat I think of as digitallyliterate.For me digital literacy is aboutcreativeappropriation, agile adoption, digital agility…. whateveryou want to call it.
In other words, in a multiplicity of ways some of the existing ePioneers exemplify the Oxford Brookes digital and information literacy graduate attribute, being ‘confident, agile adopter(s) of a range of technologies for personal, academic and professional use’. It is this confidence and agility, rather than specific knowledge of software or devices, that is of greatest value to the project and to developing the digital literacies of others. The ePioneers suggested that as far as possible supplementary ePioneer training on how to use various digital tools should be made available online so that ePioneers can ‘do all the training in their own time and then in their e-portfolio tick off the training when it's done’ (ePioneer 1, 14 Sep 2012).
Now we are getting into territory where we know a lot less about what’s going on..I’m not drawing any distinction here between staff and students. I’m just going to start talking about ‘people’.
I showed you this model earlier, and Liz Bennet is going to say some more about it so I won’t go into any detail the important thing to note is that it is about moving on from AccessSkillsPractices identityThe bit of this I want us to think about today
We said DL was a socially and culturally situated practice …Such practices are typically personal and flexible and developed in response to situational need. Does this mean that rather than teaching people to use technology, we should be encouraging them to develop their own ways of using technology to meet a particular need they have?Well yes. This suggests that in order to move people beyond Skills (I CAN), we should be thinking more about the triggers that encourage the development of practices (I DO). I’m going to suggest 3 ways of thinking about how to support PEOPLE (including ourselves here today) to develop digital literacy:Using technology to met a particular needEncouraging informal learningContextualising your definitions/objectivesThen hopefully you can use these 3 principles when you come to developing a framework for us this afternoon, after you’ve heard from a whole heap more examples.
We said DL was a socially and culturally situated practice …Such practices are typically personal and flexible and developed in response to situational need. Does this mean that rather than teaching people to use technology, we should be encouraging them to develop their own ways of using technology to meet a particular need they have?Well yes. This suggests that in order to move people beyond Skills (I CAN), we should be thinking more about the triggers that encourage the development of practices (I DO). So, knowing this, how can we support PEOPLE (including ourselves here today) to develop digital literacy? I suggest.Using technology to met a particular needEncouraging informal learningContextualising your definitions/objectivesThen hopefully you can use these 3 principles when you come to developing a framework for us this afternoon, after you’ve heard from a whole heap more examples.
Here’s a good example…Reference Me, developed by students in response to a need, shared informally.
Let’s think of something more relevant to supporting practitioners like… Learning Design.If we know that practices are developed in response to need so choosing your trigger is going to be important if you want practices to applied in certain contexts. So, triggers for developing staff digital literacies might be:‘using digital technology to design and develop study programmes and modules using learning design tools (as in the OU definition and staff development framework)There is a problem with digital literacy being a socially situated practice, and being so context specific, and that is that it seems that transferring capabilities developed in one context to another is more problematic than we thought. So important to develop the practice in the context you want it to be used.
If we know that digital literacy is developed through informal learning, might be important to provide ways of sharing and networking our use of technology e.g.The LAMS community created six years ago is still active and is fundamentally different from other online repositories that might superficially look similarWithin the LAMS Community the focus has been on creating a community space in which barriers to exploiting Learning Designs are removed and sharing amongst teachers is fostered. James finds that teachers value advice on versioning generic templates for their discipline and the opportunity to share designs within a closed community of close colleaguesthe sharing and reuse of Learning Designs could be facilitated by supporting teachers to combine generic designs with methods and content that meet the needs of their specific discipline communities.
I’m not drawing any distinction here between staff and students.
All agree? Are these statements enough?Probably not, in fact the 2012 European Commission report on expert’s view of digital competence, starts from the premise that educators require more clarity from such definitions.
I’m not drawing any distinction here between staff and students.