Readings
Maha Bali: Knowing the Difference Between Digital Skills and Digital Literacies, and Teaching Both
Doug Belshaw: Essential Elements of Digital Literacy (chapters 2, 4, 5, 7)
Critical Questions
From reading through Bali and Belshaw’s reading I am beginning to understand what digital literacy is. Like digital citizenship, digital literacy is an umbrella statement that refers to an individuals ability to communicate and express their ideas on the internet through a variety of locations from many devices. It covers things from social media sites to blog sites and the ability to use phones to laptops. This is where everything starts to get tricky. Bali’s article talks about the difference between digital skills and digital literacies. Somebody who is tech savvy isn’t necessarily skilled in digital literacy. The concept is easier to explain with an example.
Let us say that you want your students to look up information on birds. You task your students with finding certain pieces of information and listing their sources. A student who is only digitally skilled will just look up the bird in google and click on the first result. The digitally literate student would make sure they are searching the right website for valid information, check on how reputable a source is, and assess the biases the author might have on these birds.
To illustrate the difference I have created a ven diagram below to illustrate some differences between the two.
