Below you’ll find my description of “digital literacy” as both a concept and a practice, which I wrote for a section of WRTG 1150 (first-year writing) I taught in 2010. Keep in mind that the audience for this description is first-year students, not faculty, so it may seem over-simplified.
My thinking about digital literacy has also evolved quite a bit since I wrote this, so I might go in a slightly different direction if I were to write this now, but it’s worth noting that my description echoes what you’ll find on the NCTE position statement on 21st century literacies and in the CCCC Position Statement on Teaching, Learning, and Assessing Writing in Digital Environments.
You can find some the sources that have influenced my thinking both in my Diigo library and on the Digital Composition Bibliography page here on this site.
I haven’t taught first-year writing since then, so you might also want to take a look at the Digital Literacy learning goals I developed for my upper-division writing classes.
COURSE DESCRIPTION
WRTG 1150: First-Year Writing and Rhetoric is designed to introduce you to a number of concepts and skills you will use throughout your college career and beyond. The Program for Writing and Rhetoric offers over 80 sections of WRTG 1150 each semester, and each section is taught by an instructor who has expertise in the academic discipline of Rhetoric and Composition.
All sections focus on the study of reading, writing, rhetoric, and research as appropriate to first-year college students, but instructors customize their individual sections to explore specific topics and types of writing, which means that no two sections of the course look exactly alike. What you work on in our section may be different from your friends in other sections are working on, but the underlying goals are the same.
Our Topic: Digital Literacy
The topic for our section is digital literacy, which is a broad term with several layers of meaning.
On a broad level, digital literacy refers to the ability to find, navigate, evaluate, and participate in digital environments for a variety of purposes. Digital literacy also includes the ability to adapt to new digital technologies as they emerge, so what counts as a digitally literate person is continually evolving. For example, ten years ago digital literacy included knowing how to bank and shop online, use search engines to find information, communicate via email, and subscribe to digital versions of newspapers and magazines.
While these remain important skills, they are primarily oriented around being a consumer of digital content. Today digital literacy also includes the ability to influence digital content through ratings and reviews, to create and collaborate on new content using blogs, wikis, and other web publishing platforms, and to interact with other web users in a variety of social media. The tools we use for these new types of collaboration are often referred to as Web 2.0.
On a more narrow level, digital literacy refers to specific strategies for reading, writing, and research that are appropriate to the kinds of texts found in digital environments. For example:
- A digitally literate reader recognizes the features of common genres of digital writing and knows how to interpret and evaluate texts that include both written and multimedia components.
- A digitally literate writer knows how to compose a variety of types of texts for specific audiences and purposes in digital environments, including those that invite participation from multiple users.
- A digitally literate researcher makes effective use of search engines, databases, social bookmarking, and other digital tools to find, evaluate, and share information.
Because your course materials and assignments in college will increasingly draw from and require participating in digital environments, digital literacy is a particularly useful topic for a course in college writing.
Our Focus: Practices and Concept
In this course, we will focus on digital literacy as both a set of practices we will engage in and as a concept we will investigate through readings and videos. By “set of practices” I mean that we will make use of a variety of digital tools and environments both to explore how they might be useful to you in college and to further enhance your proficiency at navigating new digital spaces.
For example, you will keep your own blog, work with other students on a wiki, participate in a social networking site for the class, use a social bookmarking tool, and so on. You will enjoy some of these activities more than others, but that’s part of the process of learning what works and what doesn’t. We will undoubtedly also run into technical challenges and frustrations, but that too is part of the learning process. Some of you are already fairly proficient at using the kinds of tools we’ll be exploring, while for others they will be brand new, so we will all work together to provide supportive network for learning and experimenting.
We will explore the concept of digital literacy through a range of readings and videos, some of which I will assign and others you will find and share with the class. Some of the issues we will consider include: the reliability of information published on platforms open to public collaboration (such as Wikipedia), the importance of establishing an online presence that is trustworthy and professional, how social media tools contribute to enhanced learning and creativity, the nature of identity in disembodied environments, the loss of privacy in an increasingly public web, the power of public opinion to shape digital content, the role of ownership in a remix culture, and more. We will also follow the path of your own interests and curiosity to explore other related issues for reading, writing, and discussion activities.