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Temple University Center for Research
in Human Development and Education |
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If we wish to support educators in fostering digital
literacy in their classrooms, we must articulate the
component skills that make up digital literacy. Just as
content area standards have provided teachers with clear
statements describing the components of broadly defined
skills such as "analyzing data" or "interpreting
literature," a framework for digital literacy will guide
teachers in identifying the elements of their students' work
that reflect their capabilities in this domain.
When
teaching and assessing writing, teachers address three
general areas of literacy skill: technical skill,
compositional skill, and style as well as content. When
grading student work-a persuasive essay, for example-a
teacher attends to each of these areas. The most basic area
is technical. Has the student properly spelled,
capitalized, and punctuated the essay? Are the paragraphs
properly indented and the basics of grammar observed? At the
same time, mastery of these techniques is meaningless unless
students possess the compositional skill to craft
sentences and paragraphs that convey their meaning clearly
to the reader. Is the prose intelligible? Can the reader
derive the necessary information from the text? Attending to
the elements of style is a subtler endeavor, but at
least as important; younger students may only have to report
facts clearly, but more advanced students must communicate
their ideas and argue their points persuasively. To do so,
they must
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correctly
apply more sophisticated techniques, such as establishing a
consistent tone; using irony or satire; and employing
rhetorical devices such as foreshadowing, allusion, or
metaphor. Finally, the content of the essay, the
correctness of facts, is obviously important to the teacher.
None of these areas can be ignored when teaching and
assessing students' writing, and teachers expect to look at
all of these areas simultaneously without difficulty.
While content remains consistent in any
medium, the literacy skills required to communicate content
vary from medium to medium. The Education Development
Center's Center for Children and Technology organizes the
core elements of good technology use into four corresponding
skill areas: digital skill, media and meaning, point of
view, and audience. Each skill area provides teachers with
concrete ideas about what capabilities students need to
master, how those capabilities can be taught and evaluated,
and how they relate to standard literacy skills. To see how
these skills correspond, please see the EDC Parallel Skills:
Written and Digital Communication table, available at this
website:
http://www2.edc.org/cct/publications_classroom_summary.asp?numPubId=101
.
Teachers already know how to teach these
concepts for written communication-how to help students
create a coherent sentence, paragraph, or story; to
construct a persuasive argument; to use descriptive
language, metaphor, and tone; and to consider a particular
audience when crafting a piece of writing. These skills
constitute the bulk of writing curriculum in any classroom.
The challenge for 21st-century classrooms is to apply and
extend these skills in the area of digital media. Consider a
student transposing a five-paragraph persuasive essay into a
nonlinear interactive website. To exploit the qualities
interactivity can bring to a persuasive piece, she now has
to consider more than word choice and paragraph structure.
She must also wrestle with decisions regarding the usage of
images, animation, and sound. In addition, she must choose
what links to other resources to include in defense of her
argument. In the process, she may actually strengthen her
knowledge of the content.
Digital literacy poses issues that most
teachers have not had the time or training to consider, and
in the absence of that time or training, the unique
qualities of technology tools-sounds, pictures, animation
frames, points of interaction-are mere distractions. We need
to recognize that these elements of multimedia tools need
not be distractions any more than carefully chosen
adjectives or apt metaphors distract from good writing.
Technology offers new canvases on which
students may express their understanding and ideas; however,
the route to understanding and insight remains largely
unchanged. To draw upon Plato: Know thy topic, first. Know
how to present thy topic, second. *
References
Benton Foundation. (2002). Great expectations: Leveraging
America's investment in educational technology. Washington,
DC: Author.
U.S. Department of Education. (2001). Enhancing Education
Through Technology Act of 2001. Sec. 2402. Purposes and
Goals. Retrieved November 2, 2002, from
http://www.ed.gov/legislation/ESEA02/pg34.html
* Margaret Honey is a vice president at the Education
Development Center and Director of its Center for Children
and Technology (CCT). The ideas expressed here reflect the
ongoing work of a group of her colleagues at CCT: Cornelia
Brunner, Katie McMillan-Culp, Andy Gersick, Connie Kim, and
Julie Thompson Keane.
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Copyright 2001 © MARTEC
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