We all live, work and learn in a digital world, and depending on our needs we develop different kinds of digital literacies. I have been teaching online for about a year now and this experience has made me reflect on how I use digital technique, both professionally and private. Digital literacy consists of a number of essential elements as defined on the JISC website; computer literacy, information literacy, communication and collaboration, digital scholarship, learning or study skills life-planning and media literacy. In this text I will now look closer at each of these elements and reflect on how they apply to a senior lecturer in Art History.
When I started my studies in the late 90’s you had to be creative and develop your computer literacy on your own, there was little or no support from the university. And you certainly did not have access to the digital devices, applications and services that exist today. I often used a mix of digital and analogue techniques to produce a text with images, literally cutting and pasting using scissors and glue. However, I was very interested in the opportunities that became increasingly available to artists at the time and wrote my first longer thesis Art in the Age of the Avatar(1999) about how female artists used digital technologies and online art and art exhibitions. Since then what was an exception has become rule, artists use digital media both as a medium and as a way of marketing their work.
Today, I work as a senior lecturer and part of my work is to help students develop their information literacy, which includes the ability to find, interpret, evaluate, manipulate, share and record information. Especially when they are writing their thesis they need to deal with issues of authority, reliability, provenance, citation and relevance. When analysing visual material this is always a relevant issue.
In order to develop as a researcher, it is vital to use digital technologies to communicate and collaborate, it is online that most networks of knowledge can be found and I use both email, websites and social media to be part of an international academic community. Following the increase in online databases with digitized collections of primary and secondary material and open access to academic publications a digital scholarship has become viable to most academics. Most of my academic texts are available online, which also makes them globally available, making me part of a much wider academic context than would have been possible only two decades ago when I started as a student.
In Doug Belshaw TEDtalk Essential elements of digital literacies we learn about how the context decides whether you are literate, also when considering digital media. Online teaching has definitely been a way for me to develop my digital literacy as a professional. However, I feel that I want to know more about how to improve my, and my students learning or study skills. How do I make use of the digital world? In what way can technology-rich environments, formal and informal, help us study and learn effectively? Can the use of digital tools support critical thinking? Or even plan our life as professionals and students? In what way can an online presence help us to become better at what we do? We are all part of a lifelong learning process, and as digital media develops we will get more tools and our digital literacy will develop.
References
Doug Belshaw (2012) TEDtalk Essential elements of digital literacies (https://youtu.be/A8yQPoTcZ78)
Developing digital literacies (2014) JISC guide.