Digital Literacy

Musicians' drive to be productive on the Internet led to the development of practices that can inform popular music education. Expanding the concept of popular music education to include online participatory culture practices provides inspiration for musicking online relevant not only in times of uncertainty (like during mandated quarantines experienced during the COVID outbreak in 2020), but also during times of prosperity when practices can be explored in classrooms and during leisure time. In this article, the author discusses three dispositions towards online musicking: DIY-disposition (do-it-yourself), DIWO-disposition (do-it-with-others) and DIFO-disposition (do-it-for-others). The development of these dispositions leads to online and musical literacies that help develop the skills needed for online musicking and performance. This text offers a creation theory about approaching online musicking that can be applied to new technologies and media as online platforms appear and fade on the Internet.

Resumo: O objetivo deste trabalho é analisar a interação com artefatos digitais de pessoas que têm muito pouca ou nenhuma familiaridade com computadores pela da explicitação dos atos de fala tanto desses usuários quanto do designer do sistema. O que se propõe com este artigo é abordar o diálogo do usuário com o designer mediado pela interface – " preposto do designer " – e a construção do discurso do usuário com os signos da interface, tratando a interface como uma linguagem a ser aprendida. Através da observação participante de alunos de um curso introdutório à informática, foi possível observar a dificuldade dos usuários iniciantes em formular uma intenção para suas elocuções e ao mesmo tempo de entender as ilocuções do designer. Mesmo quando chegam a uma intenção, a esses usuários ainda faltam conhecimentos de como dizê-lo, ou seja, de como compor um discurso que a interface (com sua limitada capacidade de interpretação) seja capaz de compreender. Palavras-chave: linguística aplicada, interação humano-computador, letramento digital, pragmática.

In this article, a three-tiered nationwide study of the pedagogical implications of teachers as digital writers is discussed and specifically, the ways in which revision is implemented and taught in digital writing environments.  The study investigates the use of revision in the personal and professional writing of teachers and the teaching of revision in their own classrooms.  Data were collected from a sampling frame of 150 National Writing Project Summer Institute sites, resulting in 181 study participants.  Results demonstrated that the strategies that teachers used for revision in their own writing were not the strategies they used with students. Additionally, increased use of digital writing environments in their own writing correlated to an increase in the use of digital environments in their writing instruction with students.

This paper aims to put the conference theme in relation to Ulmer's thinking on what he has called "applied grammatology" and electracy. Gregory Ulmer is Professor Emeritus of English and Media Studies at the University of Florida; author of books such as Applied Grammatology (1985), Internet Invention (2003), Electronic Monuments (2006). Continuously nurturing a pedagogical interest, Ulmer devoted his research to explore the shift in the apparatus from orality to literacy, and from literacy to electracy. According to him, new media were affecting our moment the way print affected Renaissance Europe, or the way the alphabet affected Ancient Greece. Grammatology-the history and theory of writing-«shows that one of the first uses of a new technology of memory is the recording of the extant works of culture: Homeric epics inscripted in Ancient Greece; Bible printed in Renaissance Europe; novel filmed in modern America. The content of the new media, McLuhan observed, is the old media» (Ulmer 2003: 4). Here, an overlapping of transcodification and re-mediation can be easily singled out. Nevertheless, we continue to reproduce Aristotelian categories (which is fine for literacy), when what our civilization needed was the equivalent of literacy for what is now called new media: they were becoming a predominant site of cultural life, and people needed not just to consume media, but become "literate" in media. So Ulmer introduced the term electracy to describe the kind of "literacy" or skill and facility necessary to exploit the full communicative potential of new electronic media. Moreover, he suggests that «performance may be to electracy what definition was to literacy» (38). If this sentence makes any sense, we should take for serious the Biopetics/Literary Darwinism assumption that the basic forms of experience which narratives always expose us to are re-enactment, repetition, and rewriting namely , kinds of performance behaviors (Cometa 2017).

Abstract
Competitive robotics programs are shown by a number of researchers to be increasing in popularity, with team organizations and competition events being successfully diffused and adapted across the nation. This study examined, through the application of the Diffusion of Innovations theory developed by Everett Rogers, as well as how and to what degree these STEM-based learning programs for school-age children are being effectively diffused in a state which has a lack of technology access and a persistent digital divide. The basis of this study consisted of interviews with adult mentors and coaches who lead and guide these student robotics teams. In terms of Diffusion of Innovations Theory, this study examined whether and how the coaches and mentors may be the change agents and innovators who are diffusing competitive robotics technology through these programs. Participants were interviewed about the factors that assist and hinder this innovation’s diffusion and adoption in Mississippi. Further, the study also examined what STEM-based knowledge students may be gaining through the diffusion of this innovation.
Keywords: diffusion, robotics, STEM, innovations, Rogers, Everett

The UMES School of Business and Technology in collaboration with the Center for Student Technology Certification and Training has initiated an innovative three-prong program that uses the IC3 test to evaluate the information and digital literacy of new freshmen in order to examine whether students have the minimal skills necessary for college success, followed by a computer concepts course designed to prepare them for workforce entry, and finally including the availability of advanced course work and professional certifications in order to provide them with the opportunity to develop enhanced skills.

This article is about an unexplored area of information and communication technology (ICT) use in organizations related to the assumed productivity gains by the use of ICTs. On the one hand, we focus on the losses of labor time that are caused by malfunctioning hardware or non-functional software, and on the other hand, we focus on the labor time losses that are caused by a lack of skills to maximize ICT. To estimate these losses, we conducted a large-scale survey among the Dutch workforce. The respondents were presented scenarios, and then they were asked to assess the loss of labor time. When working with ICTs, malfunctions and skill insufficiencies lead to a loss in labor time of 7.5%. Organizations should account for these losses when calculating ICT expenditures of hardware, software, energy and support. The losses increase with decreasing educational attainment level. However, age does not contribute to the total average losses. In addressing experienced problems, the role of co-workers is more significant than the formally organized means by the organization. In addition, workers highly underestimate the effects of ICT-related training. The results indicate that organizations do not realize that higher levels of productivity gains are attainable.

This research highlights the challenge of providing digital literacy instruction
in a second language to adult learners who may have had limited formal
education. Animating the work is the view that success in classroom learning is linked to proficiency with linguistic structures constituting the academic language of a context (Schleppegrell, 2004) and that instructional strategies and resources mediate learning (Vygotsky, 1987). Two questions guided the study: what are the linguistic structures evident in classroom discourse on basic computer skills; and what instructional strategies promote proficiency of this academic language? The goal of the analysis was to develop an awareness of the linguistic features defining the ‘field’ of the context (Schleppegrell, 2004) and then to identify  interactions whereby teachers made them accessible to learners. Findings support the strategy of explicit vocabulary introduction preceding or provided in correspondence with computer skill instruction, and provision of ample opportunities to practice and deepen knowledge of skills and vocabulary to a conceptual level.

Smartphones are regular classroom accessories. Educators should work with children to understand the capacity of smartphones for learning and civic engagement, rather than being a classroom distraction. This research supports a collaborative project the authors engaged in with students in two states to discover what the perception of smartphone use was by students and teachers. One element of this project included students producing YouTube style tutorials on the educational use of mobile apps. The authors explored smartphone use in the classroom. Student created products correlated to technology trends in K-12 education and their relationship with state by state demographic data.

Völlig neue Bild- und Erfahrungswelten versprechen die jüngsten Produkte der Medienindustrie ihren Usern. Euphorisch investieren Google, Microsoft und Co. Unsummen in digitale Medientechnologien wie Virtual-Reality-Displays. Jeder Blockbuster muss in 3D gedreht werden. Entwicklungen wie diese verdeutlichen nicht nur den hohen Stellenwert, der sowohl der technologischen Seite als auch den ästhetischen Strategien visueller Medien zukommt. Sie werfen auch eine Reihe von Fragen auf: Wie adressieren multimodale Medienarrangements die Sinne der Rezipienten? Welche Rolle spielen Technologie und Wahrnehmung bei der Modellierung von Bildwirkungen? Um diese Fragen zu beantworten, legt der vorliegende Band den Fokus auf die Analyse medialer Interfaces. Konzentrierte sich die Bewegtbilder-Reihe bislang auf den Film, widmet sich Bild und Interface auch interaktiven Digital- und Computerspielbildern. Dadurch sollen weitere Bausteine einer kritischen Bewegtbildwissenschaft herausgearbeitet werden.

This study offers a view on students’ technology-based problem solving activity through the lens of a theoretical model which accounts for the relationship between mathematical and technological knowledge in successful problem solving. This study takes a qualitative approach building on the work of a 13-year-old girl as an exemplary case of the nature of young students’ spontaneous mathematical problem solving with technology. The empirical data comprise digital records of her approaches to two problems from a web-based mathematical competition where she resorted to GeoGebra and an interview where she explains and describes her usual problem solving activity with this tool. Based on a proposed model for describing the processes of mathematical problem solving with technologies (MPST), the main results show that this student’s solving and expressing the solution are held from the early and continuing interplay between mathematical skills and the perception of the affordances of the t...

Digital literacy endures to sway educational leaders' choices and actions as they guide faculty in effectual distance education. Andragogy, continuous education, and digital literacy, the frameworks, should be in sync to provide quality outcomes through business process improvement. To sustain excellent results, faculty must develop and maintain key performance measures to deliver successful job performance. Skill enhancement is important to current and future successes. The development of knowledge, skills, ability, and competency augmentations must be contextualized in digital literacy understanding and application. If left unchecked, unchallenged, and latent, a chasm in digital literacy will limit intellectual growth, and diminish educational standings on the world's stage of accomplishments. This paper assesses digital literacy requirements, needs and influences as they continue to control and shift 21st century actions and ideals. Moreover this presentation investigates...

This report shares the findings of a focused piece of research carried out in Scotland by CELCIS and partners at the University of Edinburgh. The aim of the research was to understand care leavers' experiences of digital exclusion before and during the COVID-19 restrictions in Scotland in 2020 and builds on earlier work which explored this issue by looking at the experience and provision across 17 local authority areas in Scotland by surveying those working within local authority services.

This research found that the experience and issues which underpin digital exclusion within the care experienced community had been exacerbated by the pandemic and its subsequent social restrictions. Challenges around ensuring digital access during the pandemic included: a lack of hardware; a lack of access to stable broadband or Wi-Fi; and for some, gaps in digital confidence and literacy.

Software permeates and impact almost every aspect of our lives today. However not much is understood in terms of how software shapes the teaching and learning of disciplinary knowledge in formal learning contexts. This paper reports on the findings from a two-year funded longitudinal study examining how the notion of software literacy is understood , developed and applied in tertiary teaching-learning contexts. We explore the relationship between student success in acquiring software literacy and their broader engagement and understanding of knowledge across different disciplines. A qualitative interpretive methodology framed the study involving two case studies of media studies and engineering students' learning to use discipline-specific software. Student data were collected through class ob-71 servations, online surveys and focus group interviews. Findings indicate that a majority of students consider themselves as early adopters of technology, knowledgeable in the affordances and constraints of their disciplinary software , and preferred informal learning strategies to supplement their formal learning of disciplinary software. There was however a lack of student critical awareness of the role of software in shaping their learning of disciplinary knowledge. The findings provide insights into practices relating to tertiary teaching and learning involving software and highlight the significance which programming code may have in the shaping and application of disciplinary knowledge in educational contexts. Implications are offered in terms of tertiary educators' practice and the provision of student learning support.

This article describes a five-week summer literacy program designed for a group of 70 multilingual refugee boys resettled from their home countries in Africa and Asia to a city in the Southeastern USA. The students attended local public schools but struggled to experience academic success in the traditional class- room. The summer program addressed this issue by offering the students a cur- riculum in which they worked, alongside American teachers, in small learning groups, completing activities premised on specific twenty-first century literacies, such as critical thinking and the creative manipulation of texts and technologies. The students interacted with high-interest literature written in English and with selected productivity tools, including the filmmaking software MovieMaker. The program culminated with each student producing a digital story – a ‘transpoema- tion’ – adapted from an autobiographical response to George Ella Lyon’s poem, ‘Where I’m From.’ The students translated their own poems through a series of scaffolded steps in order to create short films for preview and critique. Working with the computer, with texts they had generated, and with images and music, the students showcased their facility with storytelling, with the English vocabu- lary they were acquiring, and with visual media, demonstrating a growing sense of academic confidence.

ABSTRACT

The Internet as a worldwide literacy practice environment has created a new situation in communication, providing a new dynamic field for research. On the basis of the two articles under discussion, this commentary develops three main aspects of the Internet: as an informal learning environment for English as a second/foreign language; as a discursive space where identities are formed and social relationships are negotiated; and, as a space where the intermingling of the global and the local gives rise to hybrid language varieties. Taking into account that electronic environments are not neutral literacy practice environments but are involved in a complex nexus of power structures and relations that also need to be explored, this paper briefly addresses issues related to theoretical and methodological approaches for the study of language varieties in the Internet.

This longitudinal qualitative research explores the benefits and challenges of using positive peer feedback with a group of foster adolescents during a summer academy at a Northeastern university. In addition, the authors, who taught the class for four years between 2012-2015 reflect on their experience using the structured feedback as a tool in their digital and media literacy class. The paper describes how the instructors addressed challenges revolving around students' social, emotional, and cognitive needs through the incorporation of peer feedback. Based on positive behavior support and peer mentoring, the authors used a structured peer feedback as part of their digital and media literacy pedagogy. The findings show that students' use of peer feedback with different media platforms helped increase the students' engagement, develop collaboration skills and for some enhance their critical thinking. As we move to use more and more digital tools, this method of positive peer feedback can help educators to grow their students' social, emotional, and cognitive skills.

Digital Media and Learning Issue. James Paul Gee, Nicholas E. Husbye, & Jennifer Connor-Zachocki (Eds.)
This chapter examines the digital literacy practices that emerge when young children play together with digital apps on touchscreen devices. Children’s collaborative composing with a digital puppetry app on a touchscreen--with many hands all busy dragging, resizing, and animating puppet characters, and many voices making sound effects, narrating, directing, and objecting--appears aimless, chaotic, and in sharp contrast to the orderly matching activities in prevalent letter and word recognition apps that dominate the early childhood educational software. The crowded collaboration around a single touchscreen looks messy but produces a complex text built with 1) touches, swipes, and other embodied actions that make up digital literacy practices, 2) sensory or multimodal layers of colorful images, dialogue, sound effects, and movement that make up animated stories; and 3) negotiation and pooling of children’s individual story ideas for shared pretense that make up playful collaboration—all contained on a 9.7 inch screen.

The Internet represents an important source of information for many students. Yet, most lack proficiency in the requisite skills necessary for efficient and effective Internet research. As a result, teachers are seeking strategies to develop students’ skills for conducting online inquiry. Acknowledging this context, we present a self-regulatory framework, referred to as CAPES, that represents a discrete process that can be integrated into instruction to support student inquiry. This process is demonstrated through think-alouds designed to systematically guide students within key phases of online inquiry. Additional considerations and suggestions are provided to facilitate the development of lessons that incorporate the framework.

The purpose of this article is to map out learning methods to assist teachers in the development of online collaborative coursework. Inspired by the research, a well-mapped-out course appears to increase learners’ competence and confidence (Stodel, 2006). The methods are structured in relation to four conceptual thematic categories: Ethics, Caring, Sharing and Design. Ethics topics include: Credibility, Visitors and Residents model, Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants and Digital Literacy. Caring topics include: Creative Commons, Openness, Mooc, Emergency Remote Teaching and Digital Resilience. Sharing topics include: Collaborative Learning Environment and Avoiding Frustration. Design topics include: Five Stage Online Learning Model, Community of Inquiry, Constructive Alignment, Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes (SOLO) model and Backward Course Design. All of the categories include descriptions, models, theories and methods. A study is included that applies targeted approaches to a specific freestanding higher education online elective course. Comparing two identical courses with the same curriculum with structural differences. For example: Course 1 is being developed without any specific model per se and Course 2 is being developed using five approaches: Community of Inquiry, Collaborative Learning Environment, Constructive Alignment, Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes (SOLO) model and Backward Design. The study results are analyzed by the completion of learning activities and exam requirements.

Una de las fases del proceso de instrucción que menos cambios ha sufrido a lo largo de la historia ha sido la de la evaluación. En un contexto virtual, una de las preocupaciones que muestran los docentes respecto a la evaluación se relaciona con las problemáticas de su implementación y la vertebración de diferentes e-actividades. Por e-actividades se entienden todas las tareas desarrolladas por el estudiante de forma individual o colectiva en un entorno digital, y que están destinadas a obtener un aprendizaje específico. Son, por tanto, el vínculo que une la enseñanza y el aprendizaje en la denominada Sociedad del Conocimiento. En esta línea, este artículo trata de realizar una panorámica por el fenómeno de las e-actividades dentro de los entornos virtuales de aprendizaje. Para ello, realiza una síntesis de los principales estudios sobre el tema en cuanto a definición, tipología, selección y análisis. Los resultados ofrecen un recorrido que avala la importancia de estos recursos como objetos de aprendizaje auténtico. Por este motivo, es necesario que los docentes desarrollen competencias en cuanto a su selección, creación, modificación y evaluación. En esta línea, se esbozan diferentes criterios a tener en cuenta y que se pueden movilizar para el desarrollo de dichas competencias clave.

One of the phases of the instructional process that has undergone minor changes throughout history has been that of evaluation. In a virtual context, one of the concerns that teachers show regarding evaluation is related to the problems of its implementation and the design, organisation and eventually implementation of different e-activities. By e-activities we understand all the tasks developed by a student individually or collectively in a digital environment, and which are intended to obtain specific learning. They are, therefore, the link that unites teaching and learning in the so-called Knowledge Society. Along these lines, this article offers an overview of the phenomenon of e-activities within virtual learning environments. Accordingly, it goes through the main studies on e-activities in terms of definition, typology, selection and analysis. Results obtained show the relevance of such resources as authentic learning objects and highlight the importance of promoting specific teacher training competences on the selection, creation, modification and evaluation of e-activities. In this line, the present study proposes different criteria to be considered for the effective inclusion of such competences in teachers' training programmes on digital teaching competence.

This paper (in press) is part of a collection asking questions about research-creation, creation as research. It began as a poem performed publicly while walking around a colleague, whose paper I was responding to, with a tensor bandage wrapping and unwrapping, binding and unbinding his arms and torso as I changed direction in my circular windings. Slowly, I placed the lines written on sticky notes on his sweater after reading them. He was a sight, as well as the site of the performance, and together we troubled citational practices and notions of attribution. In a research-creation paradigm, what would these look like and how might they be understood? Are alternative citational practices required as current Western scholarship moves toward recognizing multimodal and performative knowledge production? This paper presents the provocative sight/site/citing of the poem through photographs of the sticky notes paralleled by reflections on this theme.

Digital literacy is essential for individuals entering college and the workplace. Students with disabilities experience a greater challenge in acquiring the skills necessary to succeed. This chapter explores the disability digital divide, success factors for acquiring digital skills, and the implications of a digital literacy curriculum developed for special education classrooms in Idaho. It demonstrates how leveraging human performance improvement (HPI) models, incorporating universal design for learning (UDL) principles, and supporting classroom teachers resulted in a curriculum to help young people with disabilities to acquire the digital skills they need to be prepared for college and the workplace.

The central aim of this study was to test a model that integrates determinants of educational computer use. In particular, the article examines teacher and school characteristics that are associated with different types of computer use by primary school teachers. A survey was conducted, involving 527 teachers from 68 primary schools. A separate questionnaire was administered to ICT coordinators from the same schools to gather additional information about cultural and contextual school characteristics. The combined impact of both teacher and school characteristics was explored through a multilevel analysis. Besides the importance of school characteristics, the results point to differential effects on specific types of computer use.

Digitalcompetenceanddigitalliteracyareconceptsthatareincreasinglyusedin public discourse. However, how the concepts are used and how they are definedremains unclear. This paper presents a systematic review of research where theseconceptsareusedinhighereducationresearch.Theaimistoestablishanunderstandingof referencing strategy to digital literacy and digital competence over time, disciplines,countries, methods and level of analysis. Three databases were used in the systematicliterature review: Web of Science, Scopus andEducation Resources Information Centre.We delimited the search totitle, abstract and keywords in the databases. Inclusioncriteria were peer-reviewed publications written in English. Initially 107 publications between 1997 and 2017 were found, with 28 addressing digital competence and 79 digital literacy. Our review demonstrates that there is a range of definitions used in higher education research. They vary depending on if the concepts are defined by policy, research or both and whether they focus on technical skills or social practices. This review indicates directions for further research in higher education i) do more research based on critical perspectives to avoid commonsensical use of the concepts, ii) take the development of definitions of these concepts seriously iii) avoid cross-referencing incompatibilities and finally iv) engage in critical investigations regarding the legitimacy of policy over research in the domain of higher education research.

Digital literacy and the level of digital skills represent a key determinant within the information-based and knowledge society. Thanks to development and higher accessibility of the Internet connection, its use is constantly growing outside the working environment, as well. The average age of users of the Internet or any other devices, such as computers, tablets or smartphones, has also increased. The level of digital literacy in specific countries has reported a considerable growth, which has brought about new opportunities connected with the use of these media. One of these is the question of the impact of digital media on readership of e-books. The paper is also analysing the level of digital skills in Slovakia and the extent of use of particular devices. The authors are studying what devices Slovak users have at their disposal, how often and for what purpose they use them. They are also observing what devices they prefer for specific activities. The emphasis is placed on readership of e-books through presentation of the results of their own research focusing on readership of electronic books. By means of various statistical methods, they are trying to define the statistical dependence between the respondents' sex and readership of traditional books compared to readership of traditional and electronic books.

The Internet is the dominant text of this generation, and through intentional use it may provide opportunities for the critical literacy infused pedagogy. As we consider the online and offline literacy practices that our students will need as future events warrant, the one constant is change. This requires a continual re-defining, and re-examination of our notions of the knowledge, skills, and dispositions utilized as we read and write online. To empower students using the Internet we need to consider opportunities to move learners from consumers to producers of digital content. More to the point, we need to move learners from content consumers to content curators to content constructors. The next three columns will focus on informing those aspects as they relate to the challenge of moving learners from readers, or consumers to writers, or producers in the digital informational space.