DIGITAL LITERACY

I n 1900, a girl consults her McGuffey Reader and traces out letters on a small piece of slate as the teacher in her one-room schoolhouse checks her work.

In 2010, a boy leans over his laptop computer, preparing to type out a story about his dog; his teacher shows him how to insert a picture into the document. The technology has changed, but the scene is the same: A child learns to be literate.

Today, computer education is part of literacy. The term digital literacy, which describes that combination of traditional reading and writing with computer skills, is about more than learning to type on a keyboard. “The most direct way of fostering digital literacy is to have our students write and produce in digital environments,” says Mark Sample, a professor of English and new media at George Mason University. “It’s not until students produce their own digital texts that their digital literacy can really expand.”

Students must also learn to be critical consumers of information, whether they find it on the Internet or on television or in newspapers, books, and magazines. Consider Wikipedia: Is it a source of misinformation and mischief or a transcendent example of the human spirit of cooperation, where the “wisdom of crowds” has created a compendium of knowledge deeper and broader than Encyclopaedia Britannica? Many schools and universities ban Wikipedia as a source for students’ research. As an English professor at a community college, I can understand this – research projects should not be supported by encyclopedia entries of any kind. But those who categorically ban Wikipedia are missing the larger lesson: The Internet makes it easier for us to dig deeper into an issue, and sites like Wikipedia allow us to be a part of this conversation, even allowing us to correct an error or add our own knowledge.

It's not until students produce their own digital texts that their digital literacy can really expand."

This is where it helps to have a high level of persistence, experience and, yes, digital literacy. Every Wikipedia page has its own history and discussion pages. The history page allows you to see every edit and the identity of every editor, and the discussion page details how those editors come to a consensus about what is to be included in the entry. This is useful in judging the accuracy of a particular article.

But while the Internet allows us to dig deeper, I could still spend all day reading articles that affirm my own opinions. Digital literacy, at its most basic, is the ability to read and post texts on the Internet – to have the skills to compose your own blog posts, letters to the editor, comments, videos, or podcasts. And, like traditional literacy, it encompasses the ability to find and read the views of those you might not agree with. The Internet gives us the ability to read and comment on news from all over the world, but it’s our responsibility to seek that information out.

Digital literacy means being able to manipulate signs and symbols and to not let them manipulate us. It means digging below the surface of a text to find out how it was produced, by whom, and for what purpose.

A recent study by the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy found that U.S. educators are not very good at teaching digital literacy. The commission, a collaboration of the Knight Foundation and the Aspen Institute, reports that “although virtually every school in the United States is connected to the Internet, many local communities have not integrated either digital or media literacy into their K-12 curricula. The Internet is offered primarily as a research tool, and students’ encounters with the Internet are framed by issues of reliability and censorship.” The Internet is presented as a mere source of information, instead of as a place to confront multiple perspectives or produce texts of one’s own.

If children have a laptop, they have access to the world. But to navigate it sucessfully, they must learn to evaluate information critically.