Digital literacies and new pedagogies for learning with technology
This post continues this weeks mini series on new pedagogies for tecahing and learning. This is based on work I am doing for a literature review.
I have been particularly interested in some of the work on digital literacies. The notion of digital literacies has been around for some time, but, at least in an Anglo Saxon context, has tended to be dominated by narrow skill set definitions. Such thinking has not gone away - Learn Direct offer a entry level Digital Literacy certificate based on
- Computer Basics
- The Internet and World Wide Web
- Productivity Programmes
- Computer Security and Privacy
- Digital Lifestyles
And Microsoft’s First Course Toward Digital Literacy claims to teach absolute beginners to computing about what a valuable tool computers can be in society today, and the basics of using the mouse and the keyboard. The interactive, hands-on lessons will help novices feel comfortable manipulating the mouse and typing on the keyboard (is this what Bill Gates is referring to when he says the Internet will displace the traditional University in 5 years).
But at the same time there has been some more advanced thinking on the meaning of digital literacy, based in part on new understandings of the mulitmodality affordances of Web 2.0 and in part on research into the way young people are using the web. There is growing evidence that young people have difficulties in interpreting and making judgements and meanings about online materials, be they text, hypertext or multi media. A third influence on this wok is the expanded idea of the importance of design as a means of communication in the wider social environment of Web 2.0.
The wider understandings of Digital Literacies is leading in terms to a move away from narrowly defined skills training towards an exploration of pedagogies in teaching and learning using technologies. I am particularly interested in a pedagogic model developed by the New London Group as long ago as 2000 and represented in the UK Teaching and Learning Programme’s recent publication entitled Digital Literacies (although sometimes a little dense this is well worth reading). The New London Group put forward four components of pedagogy:
- Situated Practice, which draws on the experience of meaning-making in everyday life, the public realm and workplaces;
- Overt Instruction, through which students develop an explicit metalanguage of design;
- Critical Framing, which interprets the social context and purpose of Designs of meaning; and
- Transformed Practice, in which students, as meaning -makers, become designers of social futures.
(Cope and Kalantzis, 2000, p. 7)
What is missing from this model is a social dimension around collaboration. But the model is strong in its focus on the new social realities engendered by technologies. It is the need to be able to understand and critique those social realities which should inform the development of new pedagogies.
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