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Digital literacy and the I-Curriculum project
By Mary Ulicsak, Learning Development Manager, Futurelab |
Introduction
What key skills do we need to be digitally literate? How can we function effectively in an information-rich world mediated increasingly by digital technologies? What is the difference in being able to operate technology and having it transform thinking? These are among the questions being asked by the I-Curriculum project. This is an EU-funded project with partners in Germany, Greece, Romania, Spain and the UK that has been tasked to look at how the various partner countries respond - or should respond - to these challenges within school practices. The aim is to reflect upon these requirements, upon the capacities of these new digital tools and their seeming implications for life, leisure and work, and attempt to map out a response for the different educational curricula of Europe.
The framework was developed by the partners from an analysis of current curriculum requirements for teaching digital technologies, relevant literature, and case studies involving innovative teaching. It is currently being validated to determine if the key skills and various levels of understanding were correctly identified. The creation of such a framework is a challenging task; indeed, the attempt to create a unified or unifying theory of 'digital literacies' across a range of different cultural and societal contexts, may be seen as doomed inevitably to failure. However, by looking at the metaskills and metaknowledge needed for living in the digital age, not the specific packages or implementations, common themes can be identified. Moreover, the key skill needed in contemporary society is shared between all participants; it is the ability to actively take part in lifelong learning. We need to enable young people to confidently and quickly learn how to work with, critique and exploit new and emerging digital tools.
What do we mean by digital literacy?
The phrase 'digitally literate' can be misunderstood as an equivalence to traditional forms of print-based literacy - 'digital reading and writing'. As it is commonly used, however, 'digital literacy' refers to the competencies required to effectively exploit the tools, practices and symbol systems made available by digital technologies. The following list contains activities that require a degree of digital literacy, however these activities are rarely performed as isolated acts:
- modelling - the creation of digital analogues of systems for analysis and experimentation
- knowledge management - conducting research, combining knowledge to create new knowledge, navigating through information structures
- multimodality and hypertext - new ways of creating communicative documents combining different modes and media and new ways of reading them
- electronic communication - not just e-mail but a whole panoply of ways in which inter-human communication is developing and how entry into communities of learners may be dependent on electronic communication
- game play - the ways in which playing digital games exemplifies ways of thinking and working in a digital domain, and is potentially a summation of the above activities.
From an analysis of the above activities, which require a new 'reading and writing' in order to exist in the digital world, four metaskills emerged. An activity that can be classified as developing digital literacy skills need not involve all four but should involve at least one of the following:
- exchanging and sharing information/communication and collaboration
- researching
- developing ideas and making things happen
- an understanding of working practices and attitudes.
Can we distinguish between levels of digital literacy?
If asked to assess a student's web page on the life cycle of the frog, what things would you look at? At a simple level you could form an assessment scheme relating to presentation and content. Has the student mastered how to change the background colour, insert links, pictures, and change font size? Are these links relevant, the text and pictures appropriate to the audience, do they show an understanding of frogs? In the I-Curriculum project we have classed these skills as: (i) operational, and (ii) integrating. The operational is the 'how to' skill, be it formatting in a word processor, searching a database or in this case being able to insert a sound of a frog croaking, while working at the integrating level requires the student to show an understanding of the goal and context - students must use language and technology systems appropriately as they are participating in an authentic form of social practice. However, what if our student started to critique the tool used to present the frog's life cycle? To suggest better ways of presenting the information, like attaching a device that can physically demonstrate how a frog leaps? Our original marking scheme is insufficient. The student is displaying transformed thinking, the technology is now taken for granted and being used in a way that is original to the student. Thus there is a third skill set that can be acquired in addition to operational and integrating; we have termed this transformational.
This idea of a transformational activity has a basis in sociocultural theory. From a sociocultural perspective there is a notion that there are two influences on human activity, they are:
- cultural tools and artefacts (these may be objects but may also be ideas) that already exist
- requirements for activity that emerge through the sociocultural system's own activity.
Thus how humans live their lives in a digital age is qualitatively different to the ways humans have lived in other times but is shaped by past practices and current requirements. What is required in a time of change, for example the realisation that one can move beyond the original task to produce a web page on frogs, is reflexive or transformational action. To summarise, in our framework we have a matrix, with an activity being judged by the metaskills used and the level at which they are demonstrated, that is, if they are operational, integrating, and transformational.
Although based on a sociocultural idea, from an I-Curriculum perspective viewing critical competency as being solely a social practice is restrictive. Although influenced by others and their interpretation, an activity performed by an individual may lead to a transformation of internal understanding and involve actions at all three levels. One need not ask a student to create an object for transformational thinking to occur. For example, just using a web search engine like Google or Teoma to look up a fact is a simple operational use. When you ask students to find specific information about traffic flow as part of a geography exercise it is clearly integrating into the study of geography. However, when the balance of education changes from a requirement to hold in memory text-book-like information to an education system that is predicated on the understanding that up-to-date, multiple-perspective information on any topic is always available on a small wireless hand-held device, it is clearly a transformation.
Caution is needed when assessing an activity using the framework as it is easier to categorise performance rather than the emergence of competence - the notion that is often embodied in professionalism - when knowing what, how and why are also informed by the affective identity of the learner. It is hard to operationalise significant ideas such as emergence and identity, attributes that impact and change the way the learner develops and acts in the world, so they can be assessed. Yet they need to be considered in order to understand their contribution to different learning activities. Therefore the framework also refers to competences being exemplified and emerging in a community. A community being a group of people who engage in a shared enterprise over time where learning comes from and is demonstrated by engagement in social practice.
A final thought
An underlying tenet within the I-Curriculum project is that there are new ways of knowing and being in the world. It is not sufficient that a curriculum just adopts the simple operations of the tools that make those new ways of knowing and being possible. For example, a student is not truly digitally literate if they are only taught the mechanics of a modelling tool like how to enter formulae into a spreadsheet. New ways of knowing mean that there are new things to know, new ways of organising knowledge and new ways of classifying knowledge. The project is seen as iterative development, thus the framework that will be produced and the accompanying examples are not a definitive document. The framework will form the basis for guidelines for teachers and policy makers. These will be designed to help in examining current curriculum and learning design, locating the process within the demands of changing cultures, and mapping educational provision onto the new demands of new contexts in which life, work and education interact.
The I-Curriculum project will be presented at the Futurelab conference Beyond the Blackboard: Future Directions for Teaching.
Partners
Kathy Kikis-Papadakis, FORTH, Greece
Dr Mario Barajas Frutos, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain
Lars Heinemann, Universitat Bremen,Germany
Dr Logofatu Bogdan, Universitatea din Bucuresti, Romania
Martin Owen, Futurelab, UK
Links
I-Curriculum project home page: promitheas.iacm.forth.gr/i-curriculum
August 2004
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