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Digital Literacy: The Student Perspective

Bobbi Newman pointed to this interesting post:

What is a Digital Literacy?

In What Are Digital Literacies? Let’s Ask the Students Cathy Davidson talks about asking her students in “This Is Your Brain on the Internet” and “Twenty-First Century Literacies” about digital literacies. Here is the list they came up with:

• Using online sources to network, knowledge-outreach, publicize content, collaborate and innovate
• Collecting, managing, and interpreting multimedia and online data and/or content
• Appreciating the complex ethics surrounding online practices
• Engaging successfully in an “Innovation Challenge,” an exercise in simultaneous multi-user, real-time distance collaboration, on deadline
• Developing a diversity of writing styles and modes of communication to best reach, address, and accommodate multiple audiences across multiple online platforms
• Demonstrating technical and media skills: Web video, WordPress, blogging, Google Docs, Livechat, Twitter, Facebook Groups, Wikipedia editing
• Participating successfully in peer leadership (without an authority figure as the leader to police, guide, or protect the collaborators), peer assessment, peer self-evaluation; making contributions to a group on a coherent and innovative project
• Cultivating strategies for managing the line between personal and professional life in visible, online communities
• Understanding how to transform complicated ideas and gut reactions about technology into flexible technology policy
• Learning how to champion the importance of the open Web and ‘Net Neutrality
• Collaborating across disciplines, working with people from different backgrounds and fields, including across liberal arts and engineering
• Understanding the complexity of copyright and intellectual property and the relationship between “open source” and “profitability” or “sustainability”
• Excelling in collaborative online publishing skills and expertise, from conception to execution to implementation to dissemination
• Incorporating technology efficiently and wisely into a specific classroom or work environment
• Leading peers in discussing the implications and ethics of intellectual collaborative discourse and engagement online and beyond
• Using the superior expertise of a peer to extend my own knowledge”

Three great things happened here:

1. They asked the students! That’s a Martha Stewart ‘good thing’.
2. Good trainers know that it is better to build on current skillls and perceptions than to try to replace the current way of work and thinking.
3. Good marketers know that you should align your communication with your target audiences with their perceptions and goals – not yours.

What was the last thing your library asked a group of users – in a focus group, the hall or wherever?

What did you change as a result of the information?

Stephen

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Posted on: April 27, 2011, 5:40 am Category: Uncategorized

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