Themes+III+-+Digital+Literacies

Theme 3: Digital Literacies
Key Understanding 1: Importance of developing Critical and Digital Literacy Class discussion to generate thinking about what digital literacy means and what our role is as teachers in developing our students litereacy. //Focus on article: Google: Wikipedia white bread for mind (West Australian, 16 January 2011) ban on 1st year students using Wikipedia or Google.//
 * Reasons in support of ban - to teach them the richness/difference of other sources of information,
 * Against - need to be able to differentiate between and build skills in identifying the value of different sites over others as an information source.

Expansion on notion of being able to develop or know when to apply different conversational registers. Need students to build an understanding of broader sense of critical literacy and digital litereacy skills so they can integorate the natue of the information they are finding.

Critical Questions of: Who is writing, why, is there bias, is a scholarly article more trustworthy than a wiki site, other socio-economic factors.

Review :
 * Key Understanding 2: The relationship between Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and the coming Web 3.0 and impact on education **

__Web 1.0 - Reading (intelligent web)__ Web 1.0 educational advantages; student autonomy, authentic materials, some multi-literacies, limited interactivity.
 * A defnition Web 1.0 - information web, about information transmission, one way. Still was dependent on those who had access to resources to build the content on the web.
 * Web 1.0 pedagogy - transmission, guided discovery (webquests, problems to solve going from website to website), matches well with behaviourism (quzzes and puzzles - going over, learning sets of informaiton)

__Web 2.0 - Read/Write, the Creative Web__
 * More about engaging with content and sharing of information on topics of shared interest
 * Based around communities and networks
 * Pedagogy - collaborative learning, creating, openness to sharing of information rather than competition

See Copacetic, Ace King - Web 2.0 vs Web 1.0
 * Slide Diagram of the changes from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0:
 * 1996 (250,00 sites, published content, small amount of user generated content)
 * 2006 (80,000,000 sites, still published content, but alot more user generated content and growing)

Quote by GlennF: No longer about number of hits but about mindshare - people engaging/connectin with me in conversation.

__Web 3.0 -Semantic Web (Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the Web)__
 * Metadata idea, as you attach data about data then search engines will be able to more accurately analyse the data out there and better pin-point and bring together the data you need to meet your needs.
 * Idea that your search engine and your computer will get to know you better and then only deliver to you what you are interested in and surround you with topics and people of interest to you.
 * Concern that it will reduce the possibility of serendipity, of being able to find ideas that you would not have been looking for (like you may in browsing a bookshelf at a library);
 * Also concern about not being able to have multiple intelligences, the push by Government and business to create one profile of you that they can then track and market exclusively too. Issue of peoples personal lives being taken into consideration in a professional context.

Going beyond the Web:

Cloud computing –Huge server clouds that store your data and your software with only thin client access.Discussions about where your server farms are located to ensure that ongoing access.

What is the privacy and security of your data? What about the access to your data should the web or internet not be accessible?


 * Cloud computing + mobile devices = “Web meets world”** Term coined byTim Berners Lee.


 * Being able to use your mobile device to track real world objects (ie. tagging your cow or merchandise and tracking it around the world)
 * Augmented reality – where you can gain more information about real world objects through your online environment, scanning an object in and connecting to other content about it.


 * Key Understanding 3: Digital Literacies: **
 * The kinds of literacy skills we need to be conveying to our students to make them effective communicators in the 21st Century; **


 * Print Literacy – has not gone away, web 2.0 still based on text.
 * Nuts & bolts of spelling, grammar etc…
 * Need a high level of conventional literacy skills to be able to participate in online blogs, wiki’s etc…
 * Netspeak – Text speak (crystal, david)
 * Need to educate kids on how to be discriminating about when they use test speak and when proper language is required. Codeswitching approach, how to do this – when and where it is appropriate
 * Fear that use of this language will destroy ability to use standard language (study by Nenagh Kemp (2011) – “relationship overwhelmingly possible and in part causal” – about breaking the rules of language but you must know underlying rules in order to do so…
 * Linguistic register – from slang, to formal, to text speak
 * Sample handbook on txt msgs – emoticons easy but not as easy in abbreviations (part of being part of local culture).
 * Programs that translate for example txtspk, dtxtr, - good to get students to think about codeswitching.
 * Hypertext Literacy
 * David Weinberger says we should view them as a new form of punctuation, but instead of telling you where to stop they tell you were to continue.
 * See slide of what they do – how interwoven a text is, can work against cohesiveness (decision can be made against continuing with author) and can work towards greater autonomy (choose to stay or move away from a particular author)
 * Need to teach our children how to write in hypertext (what is it doing – does it help to break down an issue into a range of related concepts?)


 * Multi-literacies
 * – not possible to focus exclusively on the written word, but you need also visual Literacies to be able to no how to read different online environments.
 * Eg. Tag cloud Literacies, visual cloud Literacies.
 * Ways to build multi literacy: Voice thread, Glogster, Voki, Capzle etc to be explored in later weeks.


 * Search literacy – not a lot of awareness about different search engines
 * Bias towards commercial, popular, recent and personalised
 * Different search engines present different types of information.
 * Eg. Searching literacy in diff search engines (Quintara, google image swirl, viewzi photo to cloud) can provide different presentations of results.
 * Gnosh – web 3.o – giving results listed from different platforms.


 * Tagging literacy
 * Defined, adding a descriptive term items found online – vs dewey decimal system (eg. English language corner and getting students to work together on indexing information online)
 * Eg: speeches of different key figures run through wordle and then compared to others.
 * Eg: wordsift – designed to be used by language users to see which words they use more often in an essay they have written – has a thesaurus built into it.


 * Information Literacy
 * Skills at evaluation information online or critical literacy
 * Must have a good answer to a young person saying they can find information they need online…
 * Anyone can put any information online and the onus is on us to question it.
 * David Weinberger age of print “authority of sources comes with a stop sign”
 * IL about asking key questions, asking key questions (who wrote this, why, bias), having a baseline of knowledge (need to be able to contextualate the information to what you already know); triangulate (be able to compare very different sources or perspectives) – to evaluate.
 * Teachers working with bogus websites to help them to become clear about the need to question sites (eg. DHMO.org, All About Explorees) seePhilBradleysWebsite and see Bogus Websites (hosted by Education Department of WA).