WikiTeach

(Short presentation given at NetHui, Auckland, 29 June 2011)

What does digital literacy even mean? I seem to be at odds with most people using the word, who are keen to push Microsoft Word training at schoolkids and the unemployed. This hearkens back to an older era of schooling, when the classroom was a space for preparing good employees who could write neatly and keep accounts. But we all agree the purpose of education has moved a bit beyond that.

I deal with plenty of 18-year-olds at a university, the cream of the New Zealand education system, potential voters and workers. They’ve never known a world without the Web. What has over a decade’s education in that environment done for them? Well, I find they cannot reliably distinguish between:

• A PDF of a journal article linked from a webpage
• The text of the article on the page
• A government or university press release about the findings
• An opinionated blog posting summarising the article

They think these are all the same thing. All sources are cited with equal authority, research is primarily through Google searches (rather than Google Scholar or specialised databases), and students are too naive to distinguish between content on .edu, .org, and .com domains. Most don’t realise that Wikipedia is editable by anyone, let alone that they should correct mistakes where they see them: it’s gospel. I’ve yet to meet a student that displays any skepticism about the possible agenda of a website author: if it’s on the web, it’s true.

In one recent case, a pithy quote in an essay was attributed to “essays4u.com” (not its real name), a commercial US term-paper mill for cheaters. The student had obviously found one of the site’s sample essay via Google, liked the ideas expressed there, and carefully cited the source as instructed by their lecturer. All in good faith. That takes a pretty breathtaking lack of understanding of the internet.

Parents and some teachers grossly overestimate the computer competencies of teenagers. So, indeed, do those teenagers. But I’ve met very few “digital natives”: most have very restricted areas of expertise, do not grasp the underpinnings of the technology they use, and flounder when required to learn something new. These are not the “life-long learners” of the NZ curriculum—their computer education has been through workshops and formal classes (just what most digital literacy fans advocate), so they passively expect to be taught the skills they need. It’s a rude shock when I expain they now have to teach themselves new software packages, every year for the rest of their lives. 

The digital illiteracy I see is not just a problem for university students. We want those 18-year-old school leavers to be able after a few years to set up a business, research a medical condition, make purchasing decisions in an office, or deal with EQC and CERA so they’re not left destitute after an earthquake. If they don’t learn these skills during their time in the education system, they’re going to find it much harder to teach themselves other skills later. Advocates of digital literacy sometimes forget that, like all education, it's learning how to learn.

So I don’t think digital literacy means “computer skills” classes—certainly not programming skills as some die-hard geeks seem to think (you don’t need to know how to build a car to drive one, or to write a novel before you can read one). 

I don’t think digital literacy is about learning this commercial software package rather than that one: they'll probably both be obsolete in a few years. Cheap or free software’s obviously better because everyone can own it; beyond that, the argument’s a waste of time. General principles are the goal, so making students switch to a new browser or word processor every week teaches flexibility.

I don’t think digital literacy is a self-contained subject, either, tacked onto the curriculum—it should be a seamless underpinning of the way we teach, because schools have enough to do already. 

I don’t think it’s about “employment skills”, because we live our lives on computers, not just our jobs. It’s not touch-typing and pivot tables.

Digital literacy is about being an informed, sceptical citizen that can find and filter information.