Literacy in a Digital World

Literacy in a Digital World By Christian Devine

My idea of Literacy before taking this class

Walking into this class, my ideas about literacy did not expand past the ideas of reading and writing. When I was in middle and high school, the term literacy was usually always associated with both of those things, and we were regularly assessed on our reading comprehension and non-creative writing pieces. After a few class readings and discussions, my previously notion has shifted significantly, as I now understand it as digital literacy, which is the ability to shift through all sorts of 21st century multi-media and be able to analyze and evaluate what the author or authors of that specific multi-media text is attempting to convey.

My Idea of Literacy after a few weeks

If we want our students to be prepared for the ever-changing technological world, we as educators need to embrace the paradigm shift in not just how we teach students, but also what we teach them in regards to the digital world. Being digitally literate will help better assist students in all future academic, social, and professional environments, so it is a necessity we provide our students with learning experiences that allow them to expand their digital literacy, and ultimately, become independent thinkers in the age of technology and mass-information.

Twenty-first Century Texts

Texts in today's world come to us in a variety of different ways. People today, from their hand-held devices, watch videos, view digital pictures, and read social media blogs that all have implications on the way we think. Whether these implications are economical in the form of advertisements, or political due to the rise of "fake news" in the past election cycle, it is important that we as future educators provide our students, who are citizens of the world, with the opportunity to analyze and break down what these texts are trying to convey to us. The digital age has created a mass influx of visuals shared across all forms of media, so in order to create independent thinkers who are constantly sifting through information presented by others, visually literacy must be practiced in the classroom in order for students to create their own decisions.

The Role Social Media plays in Digital Literacy

As a future social studies educator, I will always be encouraging my future students to stay updated with current events all around the world, but in the age of social media and the production of so-called "fake news", which has the ability to spread like a wildfire across social media sites, this task will require information literacy. Social media also has a way of presenting us news that may be relevant to what we want to see, and hide information from us that we may not be particularly interested in. This phenomenon is referred to an "echo-chamber", where social media users only view links and media that their like-minded friends or followers happen to post or share. Students all have their social media accounts filled with information at their fingertips, so it is important students know how to look at it, evaluate it, and use it to reach a deeper understanding about what the text is trying to tell them.

Historical literacy skills needed in the digital age

Gathering historical information and analyzing its implications has changed drastically due to technology. Information used to be only found in books, maps were only printed, and paintings had to be seen in museums or reconstructed. In the digital age, primary and secondary sources can be accessed much faster through research engines, and the amount of information on a particular topic has also increased. Technology has the ability to synthesize all of the mass-information out in the digital world and provide us with more relevant sources than ever before. Important skills for students when using these primary and secondary sources to draw conclusions about the past include evaluating the sources for what they are, considering the historical context of the situation, and determining the perspective from the author, speaker, or transmitter.

Created By

Christian Devine

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