Digital Literacy

In "No Longer a Luxury: Digital Literacy Can't Wait," Troy Hicks and Kristen Turner delve into the world of digital literacy and what it means for English teachers. Something that really stuck with me from this article was the line, "Digital literacy is about more than just adding technology into the teaching we already do." I guess I had never really thought about it before, but as a student, there has been plenty of times where powerpoints were supplemented for content and blogs were used in an incorrect fashion in order for the teacher to claim that they were "integrating technology."

For example, something that I really disliked was when I took British Lit as an online course at CCRI, we would have weekly discussion board posts. Except the word, "discussion" might as well have been left out because discussion is the exact opposite of what it was. Each week there was a reading assignment and then the discussion post for that week would be to respond to a prompt written by the teacher, post it, and that's it. There was no need to comment on classmates work, or even read it for that matter. I didn't understand why it was something we were even doing because it defeated the entire purpose of having a blog-like format to read, comment and interact. As Hicks and Turner would define it, my professor was using this format as a call and response, which is something they strongly suggest staying away from. From a student standpoint, I agree that I got nothing out of this and even felt discouraged that no one would read my work - from a teacher standpoint, all my professor had to do was tell us to write about what inspired us and to interact with each other and I feel as though it would've been more meaningful. She was not teaching us how to be digitally literate.

The whole concept of the internet being mundane that gets brought up in the podcast, The Internet of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly with Danah Boyd and Krista Tippet really spoke to me because I find it to be so true. I don't really know what generation I fall into in terms of being a millennial or whatever but I do know that in my childhood, I grew up outside. My parents kicked me out of the house at 10am on Saturday mornings and told me not to come back until lunch time. I remember the days when they wanted me to stay inside and I begged them to let me out, like a dog. Listening to Boyd's history with technology made me think of this because it wasn't until I was about 8 that my family got a computer and even then I wasn't allowed to use it. Computers weren't even introduced into my classroom until I was in middle school, and even then they were on short supply, similar to the imaginary school in the Hicks/Turner article, Exodus Elementary. When I compare my experience with computers and technology however with my niece, it's been around her entire life. She's never grown up in a house without a computer, and my nephew who is only 2 years old knows how to work Snapchat better than I do. This also ties into Boyd from the podcast talking about the concept of being a "digital native." When I think of the word native, I think of someone who has been born into something - like a native speaker of a language. The idea that "digital natives" don't have anything new to learn because they've been born into it, however, is overreaching, I think, because it's possible to learn something new every single day.

So what does all of this mean when it gets translated into the English classroom? Technology has to be used as more than just a substitute. It can't be thrown in randomly for the sake of using it without it being meaningful. Hicks/Turner offer a solution in their article, "English teachers must embrace a new role: We must advocate for digital literacy, not just technology, in a way that reconceptualizes our discipline. We must dump the dittos, throw out the workbooks, and remix our teaching for a digital age."