Digital Literacy | W8 Q1 | Forum

This week, the readings on digital literacies and social scholarship, raised many questions about the affordances and constraints of technology on reading, learning, and knowledge production in the digital context wherein we are currently situated. Rich (2008) raised a lot of questions for me in particular as I struggled through which “side” to take in the digital literacy debate. In the article, Rich (2008) presents differing points of view as to whether or not digital literacy needs to be something that is explicitly taught in schools. In Rich’s (2008) article, some contended that growing up in a technologically enhanced environment, kids learn how to be competent users of the internet and do not need this type of instruction (likening this to the reason as to why kids do not need to learn how to read a text message. However, as Rich (2008) pointed out, “Web readers are persistently weak at judging whether information is trustworthy.” This really stood out to me as the amount of dis-/mis-information that consistently gets posted, reposted, consumed, produced, and re-produced on the internet and social media sites is pervasive. I am specifically thinking about this in light of the current and ongoing election site wherein people are proving to struggle with the skill of judging the trustworthiness of information posted on the internet and mis/dis information is running rampant in regards to the election process and presidency. The current political context proves that digital literacy is something that must be taken seriously by educators, researchers, and internet users.

The Greenhow & Gleason (2014) article highlights the value of social scholarship in its ability to offer decentralized and co-constructed knowledge amongst a community of learners. What I appreciated most about this article is that it shatters the traditional notion of who has access to and rights to knowledge production and construction, flattening many of the dualistic divides that exist in traditional research. This is important as scholar-teachers entering the field and to reconsider the resources available to us in learning, researching, and networking.