Build a Digital Literacy House
Literacy is, and has been, a significant concern in education. For most of the time formal education has existed, literacy has mainly referred to reading and writing. These are obviously still very important (you wouldn't be reading this post without them!), but the concept of literacy has expanded beyond those essential skills.
Digital literacy is a relatively new focus for educators, at least partially because the internet itself is relatively new. As I mentioned in last week's post, the 2008 update to CIPA (enforced 2012) mandated implementation of what amounted to digital literacy programs, though without that specific language. Around this time, digital literacy and social media literacy pioneers like Renee Hobbs and Howard Rheingold were discussing what the core competencies and skills of these literacies should be.
Social media and the digital landscape as a whole has great potential to empower both young people and adults, but as Rheingold says, "access to many media empowers only those who know how to use them." For this potential to come to fruition, everyone must learn how to use these new digital tools effectively, as well as how they can be used on us.
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| Image made by author with tools at www.cbc.ca |
The Foundation
Renee Hobbs lists five core competencies for digital and media literacy:
- Access
- Analyze
- Create
- Reflect
- Act
These competencies are skill focused, building students' abilities to interact with digital content. The access competency is about finding and sharing information using media and technology, and cultivating the ability to locate and identify relevant information. Knowing how to analyze means using critical thinking skills to evaluate the information and its source, and understanding the consequences of the message. It involves the ability to effectively examine the rhetorical and communicative components of the information.
Learning to be comfortable and confident creators with awareness of rhetorical techniques will help students excel in digital spaces. Reflecting on the impact of media and technology on our lives and thought patterns helps students become more humane consumers and creators, finally leading to action. Action includes working individually or collaboratively to solve problems and share information, which supports leadership and teamwork skills while developing integrity and accountability.
Hobbs' competencies are a good starting place to understanding the essential skills required on the road to media literacy. Even though they were published in 2011, the main message holds up in today's digital landscape. They are a strong foundation to build our digital literacy house on.
The Walls
Howard Rheingold describes five literacies for social media use (which can be applied to the internet more broadly):
- Attention
- Participation
- Collaboration
- Network Awareness
- Critical Consumption
Rheingold begins with describing the classroom as a marketplace of attention - at least it is to students. In this marketplace, if the teacher can't compete with the internet for their students' attention, that's the teacher's problem. Attention is a hot commodity today, even more than it was when Rheingold wrote this article.
While attention is more passive, participation means you are being active in digital spaces, not just consuming information. However, participating does not automatically imply understanding the rhetoric of participation. Being literate in participation means having the rhetorical ability to communicate opinions in a productive manner.
Social media and modern networks allow collaboration on a large scale, from protests to missing person searches to natural disaster responses. Collaboration empowers more people than acting alone. Effective collaboration often relies on good network awareness. Our network capacity has greatly expanded in the past few decades since this work was published, and it's essential to understand the nature of networks (both technical and social), especially the location of control in networks.
Critical consumption, or 'crap detection', has become an especially useful literacy in recent years. As the name implies, this involves learning how to tell who or what is trustworthy and who or what is not. Rheingold describes social media and RSS feeds as a flow of information, where you must decide what is worth your attention. In the modern social media landscape, this can look like curating your social media feed to only show creators and topics that you're interested in.
Even though it was written in 2010, Rheingold's description of key social media literacies are largely still relevant. He probably didn't predict the adoption of fact checking and community notes systems on some social media platforms, and in contrast to his students in 2010, most young people today are not as intimidated by the flood of information on social media sites. Despite these outdated portions, the concepts that these literacies are built upon are still highly relevant in the modern digital landscape. In this way, these key literacies use the skills that Hobbs describes to form the walls of our digital literacy house.
The Roof
The core competencies described by Renee Hobbs and the social media literacies discussed by Howard Rheingold are still useful today. They are all important, but the ability to evaluate the veracity of sources is an especially useful skill because it can be an intellectual foundation for the other skills and literacies. If you know how to identify an unreliable source, you can move beyond passive consumption and easy access to understand what you are consuming/accessing first. If you know what goes into creating a reliable source, you can better create your own reliable sources.
The process of evaluating sources can sound intimidating, and may be a barrier for some to cultivating the other digital literacy skills. I've embedded below a slide deck on evaluative methods that includes mnemonic devices, infographics, and videos for each method.
Going beyond passive learning and being able to apply the skills and literacies described above is how we build and maintain the roof that holds our digital literacy house together, which helps to protect us from dishonest techniques and manipulation online.
Going Forward
Digital literacy education is only going to become more important. Technology is going to continue to evolve and change, and we must be prepared to evolve our digital literacy skills along with it. To continue the metaphor, our digital literacy house must be maintained. We may need to fix the odd hole in the wall when new tools become available or environments change, and the roof will need consistent maintenance to hold strong under pressure. The foundation that we build our house on needs to be firm to support future changes. Taking the time to build a strong digital literacy house now will prime us to understand how to operate in a digital landscape now and in the future.
I love that you added your presentation into your post this week, Kate!
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