Group Admins
Description
Digital literacy of students and teachers is addressed in frameworks such as Building Digital Capabilities Framework https://www.jisc.ac.uk/rd/projects/building-digital-capability from JISC; and the ALA Framework for Literacy for Higher Education (Association of College and Research Libraries 2016). Josie Fraser’s working definition of digital literacy is “functional technical skills + critical thinking + social engagement”. Wikipedia has achieved much in giving free access to knowledge and information (Fraser 2017) but structural inequalities of race and gender persist despite good intentions: white men remain over-represented in editorial activity and content. Locally-based activist editathons eg http://www.artandfeminism.org/find-an-event/ on Art & Feminism, or during Black History month are working to change things.
LT, whether it is a service mandated by educational institutions and authorities, or a ‘found’ resource such as a social networking service (SNS) or search engine, can become an objective element of the context, and beyond critique. ‘Free’ services can rely on making money from mining user data, and ethical issues go beyond the privacy of learner data to its categorisation and hidden use in the “algorithmic culture, which wraps abstraction inside of secrecy and sells it back to you as, “the people have spoken.” http://www.thelateageofprint.org/2010/06/14/how-to-have-culture-in-an-algorithmic-age/
Given that learning and other digital technologies, that may emerge from local innovations, morph as they move through rounds of Venture Capital and other funding regimes, and may be subject to series of acquisitions and mergers, our reasoning about them cannot rely on dissection and static description. A first step is to question our acceptance of what governs reality. It is possible, if sometimes difficult, to make active choices about if and how we use technologies, and to revisit those choices over time.
Examples that have different approaches and implications include Domain of One’s Own, ClassDojo, and Raspberry Pi /Code Clubs initiatives will be shared in preparation for a discussion around the following questions:
- how can we choose and shape the LT used in learning and teaching?
- how can we adopt and use LT ethically?
- what critical literacies do we need to resist the new norm(al)?
References
Fraser, J. (2017) ‘Today’s Children’s Machine’, Hello World, Available from: https://helloworld.cc/2j7SGVw
Association of College and Research Libraries (2016). Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. Retrieved from http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework
francesbell posted an update in the session What are the literacies of resisting the new norm(al)? [1825] 2 weeks, 1 day ago
Looking forward to meeting you and hearing your contributions to my presentation this morning. Blog post with links http://francesbell.com/uncategorized/what-are-the-literacies-of-resisting-the-new-normal-altc/
francesbell posted an update in the session What are the literacies of resisting the new norm(al)? [1825] 3 weeks, 1 day ago
Glad to see some familiar faces in the audience and experiencing that moment when you spot the typo in your abstract. It’s the structural INequalities that are persisting folks but I’m sure you realised that 🙂
fixed the typo for you 🙂
brilliant service 🙂 look forward to seeing you next week.