Mapping Digital Literacies

Mapping Digital Literacies

Matthew Sowerby

Senior Lecturer in Photography, Art & Design

Edinburgh College

• Literacies for Learning in Further Education (LfLFE) project

• Collaboration between the Universities of Stirling and Lancaster

• Findings published in 2009

• With thanks to Dr Greg Mannion

The medium is the message

• Changes in how we communicate alter the structure of society

Marshall McLuhan

• The Medium is the Message 1967

• The alphabet

• The alphabet introduced literacy

• We no longer had to be in the physical presence of someone to learn what they had to say

The medium is the message

And now… a networked world

Facebook traffic in a 24 hour period

• Approximately 250 million photos per day are uploaded to Facebook.

• 7.5 billion photos a month. • 10.4 million photos an hour. • 174,000 photos per minute. • 3,000 photos per second.

9 year old Martha Payne’s £2 School dinner

Martha Payne and her blog: neverseconds.blogspot.co.uk

Douglas Adams

• “Everything that exists in the world when you are born is normal.”

Douglas Adams

• “Everything that comes along before you turn thirty is interesting and something you might be able to use in your life and career.”

Douglas Adams

• “Everything that comes along after you reach thirty is the end of civilisation as we know it…

Douglas Adams

• “Everything that comes along after you reach thirty is the end of civilisation as we know it… until its been around for a decade, when it turns out to be quite good after all.”

• Digital Natives Digital Immigrants

• Access to technology is causing young people’s brains to wire-up differently

www.MarcPrensky.com

Changing literacies

• We (digital immigrants) grew up with the transmission of information from the fixed authority of the author of the printed word

• Now students (digital natives) expect to be able to communicate, share, collaborate with new image-led hybrid-texts

- that for them is normal

Hybrid-texts

(Out-dated) models of Education

• The traditional classroom emerged to efficiently inculcate a skilled workforce to meet the needs of industry (Dewey c.1900)

Traditional literacies

• Three Rs

• Reading• Writing• Arithmetic

Closed book tests• How much can you memorise in order to pass

a test...

… in circumstances that bear little relation to anything you do in the rest of your life?

Closed book tests

• Don’t look it up• Don’t collaborate• Don’t look at your own notes

• “That’s cheating”

Modern literacies

• Knowing where to look, or find out where to look for information

• Interpersonal skills to collaborate with others• Using material gathered from research or

previous experience

• “Not cheating”

• We are driving a sports car into the future while looking only in the rear view mirror

Mapping exercise

• Three domains:

Home

Work Learning

Mapping exercise

• Place the icons in the domain where you use that literacy skill

Mapping exercise

• When you’ve finished, take a moment to look at what literacy skills you use – and where you use them.

• Which skills are central to your home, work and learning life?

Mapping exercise

• Then take a moment to look at the literacy skills you don’t use.

• Any surprises?

The message of digital literacy

• Enabling us to reconvene in tribal groups• Learning from others at a pace that suits us• Collaboration• Discussion

• “We now live in a global village… a simultaneous happening. We have begun again to structure the tribal emotions from which a few centuries of literacy divorced us.” Marshall McLuhan

Revolutions

• The Industrial revolution• The Digital revolution

• We must not allow the potential offered by this digital revolution to be hijacked by entertainment, distraction and trivia

Lights and wires in a box

• EDWARD R. MURROW

A speech at convention for American TV broadcastersChicago, October 15th 1958

Lights and wires in a box

EDWARD R. MURROW • A speech at convention for American TV broadcasters Chicago, October 15th 1958

•“This instrument can teach, it can illuminate and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box.”

“Bad weather coming, stay at home”

In the spirit of Douglas Adams…

• Unless we embrace what students find ‘normal’ – organised Education as we know it may be undermined by the natural instinct to learn

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