The transience of digital literacies

The transience of digital literacies

Technologies reflect ways of understanding the world, especially in terms of time and space. The literacies I have examined in this thesis are, in a very real sense, ways of ‘seeing’ the world and, as a result, have their own grammars and languages. Indeed, Stephen Downes has talked of quite literally ‘speaking in LOLcats’ (Downes, 2009), there being a grammar around even seemingly trivial and humorous memes such as adding cute or ironic messages to pictures of cats.

Figure 13 – Schroedinger’s LOLcat

In other words, any sphere that involves co-constructing and using a grammar to express oneself in different semiotic domains could constitute a ‘literacy’. As we may operate in many semiotic domains within the digital sphere, it may be more appropriate to apply McLuhan’s tetrads (from Chapter 8) to these domains and affinity spaces rather than the hardware used for communication. For example, it is possible for me to project a different image, use a different form of language and interact with others in a different way on social networking platforms such as Twitter than I do in my day-to-day work using telepresence services such as Skype. Each tetrad therefore foregrounds some elements of knowledge, identity and communication whilst backgrounding others.

I showed in in Chapter 5 that digital literacies can be thought of as being on a continuum of ambiguity from Generative Ambiguity through to Productive Ambiguity. In this chapter I will argue that Generative and Creative ambiguity is a result of an unsustainable focus on an individual ‘digital literacy’; the equivalent of mono sound reproduction in a world of surround sound. I argue that these digital literacies comprise of eight essential elements that form a core around which other elements may accrete. As with McLuhan’s tetrads, certain contexts and semiotic domains may call for certain elements to be foregrounded and other elements backgrounded.

Since the publication of Gilster’s (1997) Digital Literacy there has been an undue focus upon ‘one literacy to rule them all,’ which has been to the detriment of progress in the arena of new and digital literacies. As I demonstrated in Chapter 7, a multitude of ‘umbrella terms’ have been suggested by academics, relegating other proposed literacies to what I term ‘micro-literacies’. Whilst this war of attrition has been taking place amongst researchers, those in government and big business have, as we saw in Chapter 2, managed to formulate policies and accreditation schemes. In addition, rapid changes in the digital environment have become a real problem for educational institutions who have suffered a crisis of relevance. There is a dearth of guidance for schools, colleges and universities in terms of how to evolve in ways that remain pedagogically-sound and, perhaps more importantly, in ways that do not upset parents and other stakeholders such as examining bodies.

The fact that curricula are out of date with the latest research and with what employers desire is, however, nothing new. As Benjamin pointed out in the 1930s with The Saber Tooth Curriculum, we cannot define the specifics of what young people are going to need to know in the future, but we can and must define the principles upon which curricula should stand (Benjamin, 1939). People who feel overwhelmed by the rapid pace of change is not a new phenomenon; there have been those complaining about feeling overwhelmed since at least the Luddites at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, over 250 years ago.

Digital literacies are transient: they change over time, may involve using different tools or developing different habits of mind, and almost always depend upon the context in which an individual finds herself. They can be scaffolded and developed but to do so involves more than training, it involves education. Digital literacies cannot be developed in a one-off, uncontextualised half-day workshop.

- The SOLO Taxonony (Biggs, no date)

The next section of this chapter introduces the eight elements that I believe can form a core of a contextualised, negotiated definition of digital literacy for organizations and institutions. Just as the SOLO taxonomy focuses on the structure of knowledge and skills, so the matrix of digital literacies I propose can be developed in a structural, contextualized manner.