måndag 6 mars 2017

Governments and organisations - what can they do to improve digital literacy?

The first topic of ONL171 was "Online participation and digital literacies". This was a very interesting topic to start with. Digital literacies is a topic that everyone in today's world should have though through since weather we like it or not we are all a part of the new digital world! In addition, the web and applications using the web such as Twitter and Facebook, has become a large arena for political and social discussions with impact on offline behaviour.

I was researching a bit about what governments and organizations can do to promote digital literacies. To organise the work to increase levels of digital literacies frameworks connecting large areas of society is needed. One example of an international framework for improvement of digital literacies is The European Digital Competence Framework for Citizens (DIGCOMP). DIGCOMP, a framework governed by multiple-stakeholders and end-users in both EU member and non-EU member (e.g. Norway) countries.


Another example is UNESCO who has published “ICT Competency Standards for Teachers” which is developed in cooperation different stakeholders e.g. companies, universities and societies. UNESCO have also published the book “Understanding Information Literacy - A primer” which they call “...a ready reference for consulting from time to time by busy officials and executives having to cope every day with the complex and daunting challenges being faced by all enterprises and institutions, public and private, as they make the transition to knowledge societies at the beginning of the 21st century.

Organisations involved in higher education i.e. universities, are vital in the mission to increase digital literacy in societies. Surprisingly, institutions of higher education have not embraced digital literacy as a basic skill along with e.g. writing, and often digital literacy is taken for granted (Murray et al, 2014, Davies et al 2017). However, neither educators nor students in general in higher education have high quality skills in digital literacy (Murray et al, 2014, Davies et al 2017)

This last part that neither educators nor students are generally digital literate but are often mistaken for being digital literate is the most surprising knowledge I have gain during this research. I see it in my own communication with students and I think that the boards of universities should have policies for improving digital literacies.
 

3 kommentarer:

  1. I particularly liked your observation regarding the perception of educators and students on their own digital literacy skills! This is really important to take into consideration when planning technology enhanced learning courses.

    SvaraRadera
    Svar
    1. I so agree! I used to think that everyone around 20 or so were completely up to date on all technologies involved in using computers and the net. To my surprise I started to realise that this is not the case and if you want students to use these tools you have to make sure they have the tools for it.

      Radera
  2. Very interesting comments on educators' and students' digital literacies! Working in language education I can see that we, too, have an "undigested" view of digital literacies sometimes. We look very much at such aspects as multimodality, but we tend to forget about the wider implications of openness and the communicative power that resides in the use of digial resources.

    SvaraRadera