In a Hewlett Packard online survey of 527 college students at San Jose State University, 57 percent of students who responded said they preferred print materials to e-books when studying. When citing reasons for their preference, 35 percent of print users cited “note-taking ability” as a reason for preferring print vs. six percent of those who favored e-books.

“It seems that the very ‘richness’ of the multimedia environment that e-books provide — heralded as their advantage over printed books — may overwhelm children’s limited working memory, leading them to lose the thread of the narrative or to process the meaning of the story less deeply.”

“Reading comprehension research with multi-touch devices is still in its infancy and students will need to adapt new reading strategies in order to maximize their learning in this environment.”

according to one preliminary study presented by Heather Ruetschlin Schugar and Jordan T. Schugar of West Chester University.

One of the best ways for readers to show engagement with the text, he said, is through marginal annotations.

“You can also flip back and forth very easily, and spatially, there are advantages to print media.”

The trick to being a good reader, no matter the medium, is being an engaged reader, a fact that Pennington notes is well-supported by research. “It’s pretty clear that good readers are active readers engaged with the text,” he said.

casual digital reading

Students are doing more reading on digital devices than they ever have before

quoted Wittgenstein "The meaning of a word is its use in the language".

you could teach for information literacy, but not teach information literacy

This bold claim has led design and critical scholars to hotly debate if participants have a technological ideology imposed on them, or if thinking with technologies enable new civic perspectives.

In our view, cross­cultural psychological research con­firms anthropological findings of the universality of basic cognitive capaci­ties. All culture groups thus far studied have demonstrated the capacity to remember, generalize, form concepts, operate with abstractions, and reason logically.

Ama-zonian groups, such as the Piraha, whose languages do not include numerals above three, are worse at distinguishing large quan-tities digitally than groups using extensive counting systems, but are similar in their abil-ity to approximate quantities.

A commitment to sourcing every fact is laudible, of course. What’s missing is an understanding of citing and publishing models, not just the data derived from those models. This is a new problem — older media couldn’t generate data on their own. Authors will need to figure out journalistic standards around model citation, and readers will need to become literate in how to “read” a model and understand its limitations.

Beetham and Sharpe ‘pyramid model’ of digital literacy development model (2010)

What it means to be digitally literate changes over time and across contexts, so digital literacies are essentially a set of academic and professional situated practices supported by diverse and changing technologies

it can mean that students see themselves as actively building their learning

many focus on skills rather than literacies.

transliteracy is that it is the ability to be able to present your ideas, connect and manage your presence equally well no matter what tools and technologies you select

Find and vet information online. In the digital world, being able to not only find information online but also determine its quality and validity is crucial.

Some people have argued that widespread literacy (understood as reading at an eighth-grade level) was about making sure factory workers could read manuals well enough to keep machines running, rather than about providing for an informed citizenry. The equivalent for digital literacy would be to define it simply as being able to learn software quickly. Instead, digital literacy should be defined as knowing the effective practices suited to the dominant media. We should not teach students just the skills that will prepare them to follow instructions or quickly comprehend a user interface; instead we should aim to help students develop the expertise that will allow them to combine and create technologies to develop new and dynamic solutions. Just as traditional literacy and the liberal arts have been the key to independence since the advent of public schooling, digital literacy today is about intellectual freedom (see figure 1).

Despite having grown up with access to an increasing amount of technology, students now need to learn how to use technology to solve problems in academic and professional settings.

The people who were comfortable at this humanities-technology intersection helped to create the human-machine symbiosis that is at the core of this story. Walter Isaacson, "The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution" (2014)

Design and create digital solutions. Ultimately students should build a skill set that allows them to develop or customize their own digital tools. This does not necessarily mean that students need to be able to write their own applications from scratch. Rather, they should be comfortable customizing and combining tools to create a complete solution—for example, creating a web-form to automate the collection of customer evaluations and then outputting the results to a spreadsheet for analysis.

Resistance, however, is as futile

What does it mean to be human in a digital age?

Users may submit their paper using a pseudonym and in formats that contain little, if any, identifying metadata.

Toolkit for Digitally-Literate Teachers

Does the average high school or college graduate know where the alphabet comes from, something of its development, and anything about its psychic and social effects? Does he or she know anything about illuminated manuscripts, about the origin of the printing press and its role in reshaping Western culture, about the origins of newspapers and magazines? Do our students know where clocks, telescopes, microscopes, X rays, and computers come from? Do they have any idea about how such technologies have changed the economic, social, and political life of Western culture?

In Switzerland, one of my recent ancestors was functionally illiterate. Because of this, she “signed away” most of her wealth. Down the line, I’m one of her very few heirs. So, in a way, I lost part of my inheritance due to illiteracy.

Do learners have the necessary skills to be able to learn in such a free range environment?

Knowing the Difference Between Digital Skills and Digital Literacies, and Teaching Both

But I see some promising changes that align with the emphasis in the Framework on creating rather than consuming, on understanding systems of information rather than how to find stuff, on context and making critical judgments that go beyond making convenient consumer choices. If we think about information as something communities create in conversation within a social and economic context rather than as a consumer good, we may put less emphasis on being local franchises for big information conglomerates and put more time, resources, and creativity into supporting local creativity and discovery. We may begin to do better at working across boundaries to support and fund open access to research rather than focusing most of our efforts on paying the rent and maintaining the security of our walled gardens. And as we make this shift, we may be able to stop teaching students how to shop efficiently for information that won’t be available once they graduate. We may help them think more critically about where knowledge comes from and how they can participate in making sense of things.

Wido van Peursen

Web Literacy Competencies

First I review the benefits of learning in the open to build a web presence.

ASNE

news literacy curriculum

John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Robert R. McCormick Foundation and the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation.

Strengthen standards and curricula for digital media literacy and coordinate digital media literacy and civic education.

intellectual property?

as students gain proficiency in expert discourses, they learn also to surrender their writing and writerly identifications—in the form of intellectual property and intellectual property rights—to the workings of a largely hid- den curriculum that equates literacy achievement with public conformity to its laws.

including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words.

performing literacy” in particular (Fishman, Lunsford, McGregor, & Otuteye, 2005 )

the greatest oppor­tunities for librarians lie in deeper connections to the curriculum, adapting to new modes of pedagogy, linking technology-rich and collaborative spaces in libraries to learning

prevented you from

Can you think of a time when you were pretty sure about what the right thing to do was, but you didn’t do it?

Step 3: My Initial Read

Feel free to share your observations and thoughts with others below before moving on to the next exercise.

must

must

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS (SHARE YOUR ANSWERS BELOW IN THE COMMENTS SECTION)

A final exercise will challenge you to bring the skills you hone through this process to bear on a complex scenario involving several ethical issues.

Usage-based pricing, where you pay for the capacity that you use, would properly incentivize ISPs to support net neutrality

Personally, I think Digital Humanities is about building things,” said Ramsay in a polarizing talk at the MLA convention in 2011, printed in Defining Digital Humanities. Unlike many theorists, however, he was willing to make this demand concrete: “Do you have to know how to code? I’m a tenured professor of digital humanities and I say ‘yes.’ ”

The challenge is that while biologists best understand the questions that can be addressed using the atlas, they may not always possess the computational and mathematical skills needed to conduct sophisticated analyses of such data files. For this reason, biologists generally collaborate with computational scientists. It is not always clear, though, what is the best way to frame the analysis.