https://www.theguardian.com/tomorrows-campus-today/2020/may/21/digital-literacy-what-is-it-and-why-does-it-matter
This oft-quoted buzzphrase has become ever more important as remote learning takes centre stage. But how do we measure digital learning and can it really make students ‘robot-proof’?
With campuses closed through Covid-19, and teaching and exams shifted online to protect student and staff welfare, digital literacy has never looked more important.
But digital literacy is not, as many understand it, simply the ability to use a computer. Loosely defined, it’s an umbrella term for a range of competencies, such as coding, internet and computer mastery, that are used to locate, assess, create and communicate information.
And it’s critical to the career success and learning outcomes of students in every discipline. “There’s no institution that has not been profoundly impacted by digital technology,” says Todd Taylor, an Adobe pedagogical evangelist and Eliason distinguished professor of English at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. “Whether you’re studying science or social science, you need digital literacy to contribute as a worker in the current digital economy.”
Taylor says digital literacy goes way beyond mastering the basic functionality of digital tools; it involves understanding the process behind the task and adapting that knowledge and skills to other technology platforms. Many knowledge workers create and disseminate content via a multitude of modalities – videos, podcasts, mobile apps and more.
This requires “hard” technical and “soft” cognitive skills. The specific mixture differs between jobs, but most occupations demand a degree of digital literacy, says Taylor. An artist creating an exhibition poster via Adobe InDesign won’t need to code, for example, but needs to be proficient in the software, and understand their genre, content and design elements such as typography.
Technology is not just transforming the way we work; it’s changing how we teach and learn. From video lectures to virtual collaboration software, higher education is being digitised, and the Covid-19 outbreak has only hastened this process.
“This is the next iteration of teaching, and digital literacy is central to success in the classroom,” says Sid Dobrin, chair of the English department at the University of Florida and director of the Trace Innovation Initiative.
Current students grew up with Google. Their comfort with technology is off the charts. But digital literacy is “about moving them away from being passive, disconnected consumers of content to becoming active, connected, content creators”, says Taylor.
Higher education must evolve too, so students can function fully in a digital society. Some 30 higher education institutions in the US have joined Adobe’s Creative Campus programme, a powerful peer network for sharing ideas.
They aim to foster digital literacy using the Creative Cloud platform, a suite of digital apps and services that can be embedded into every syllabus. “It’s the gold standard,” says Taylor. “There’s an app for every stage of learning, from Spark for beginners to Premiere Pro, which is used to edit some Hollywood films.”
Working with such tools can nurture some of the most sought-after soft skills in graduates, such as critical thinking and creative problem-solving abilities. The process of creation is inherently collaborative and, editing a video, for instance, often involves thinking critically about how to creatively present and convey information.
During this process, students also learn how to share their work with wider audiences online, creating digital portfolios that may help in landing a job.
Employers are crying out for these skills, in part because they cannot easily be replicated by a robot and may separate humans from machines. Artificial intelligence, for example, could sound the death knell for scores of jobs, perhaps whole occupations.
Mastering novel software in a continuous way can stand students in good stead for the seismic workplace change that’s coming, says Taylor. “Intellectual agility will make students robot-proof.” Adaptability is also vital because “many of the jobs students will occupy 10 years from now do not even exist today”, he says.
While digital literacy can (happily) be nurtured, evaluating it is much more difficult. Taylor says it’s relatively easy to measure functional IT skills – whether one can create a spreadsheet or edit a word processing document – but digital literacy involves higher-order cognitive skills, which are complex and nuanced. It’s also hard to control for other variables.
So there are no consistent and comparable metrics for measuring digital literacy, which reflects the lack of a commonly agreed definition, says Dobrin. He adds, however, that a broader array of modalities used to create and circulate content can suggest a higher degree of digital literacy at a macro level – among an entire class, department or university.
An individual student, meanwhile, may be digitally literate if they can explain the reason behind their choices in creating and communicating content. “If they understand why they make decisions, they can adapt and improve them,” Dobrin says.
For him, the bigger concern is the digital literacy of teachers: the older among them learned at school through chalkboards rather than computers. “I have faculty members who refuse to even own a smartphone,” he says.
In a 2018 global survey by Adobe, 55% and 58% of educators said they don’t have access to the training and tools they need, respectively, to nurture creative problem solving in students.
The Adobe Creative Campus programme is a potential solution to these challenges, since Adobe offers skills workshops for teachers to help raise their own digital literacy and that of their students.
Given the vast benefits of doing this, Taylor expects uptake of the programme to increase, and the focus on digital literacy to endure long after the Covid-19 crisis abates. He adds that the traditional definition of literacy – the ability to read and write – is in need of updating: “Soon, we won’t need to prefix digital to literacy: to be literate will mean having mastered technology.”