Defining digital literacy

[Belinha De Abreu]

Hello Folks: I am writing an encyclopedia entry on digital literacy. I talked with Ryan at NCTE about asking you as group, what you think that term means. So.. when you hear the term digital literacy, how do you define it? You can either post your comment here or email me at [e-mail]. Thank you. -Belinha

[Lily Patterson Cooper]

Off the top of my head, I would say that digital literacy is the ability to access, evaluate, and use information in digital format.-Lily

[Mickey Young]

Digital literacy is the ability to read and write texts that are produced on electronic media. These would include computer generated texts including movies, audio files, text documents.

[Antonio Lopez]

I would say it is the ability to critically engage digital media, and to be able to communicate effectively in its native form.

[Steve Buser]

Literacy was a very simple term before digital media came along. It was the ability to read and write and communicate effectively. However, digital media brings a host of new ways to communicate. It also brings in the ability to collaborate in real time where distance vanishes as a barrier.

I like Antonio's description "to be able to communicate effectively in its native form." This presents a problem because of the plethora of native forms.

Blogs, microblogs, im, texting, twitter (it has to be a league of its own since there are more than 1000 sites that hang on to it.) art (drawing, photography, sharing, collaboration), music (jamming), file sharing, music sharing, social sharing, advice sites, business sites, personal sites, video, podcasts, cartoons, social bookmarking, digital publishing, network sites (Ning i.e.), rss feeds, aggregators, hyperlocal sites, fan sites, auction sites, graphing, social graphing, video games, virtual worlds, massively multiplayer sites, polls, social shopping, online classified, forums, answer sites, review & recommendation Sites.social news , search, social search (some would say this is just a subset -- I think the rules a drastically different, email, social email (a la Google Buzz), presentation-sharing sites, social tagging, social commenting, learning sites and more.

There is a lot of cross breeding, step children and mixed types in the crowd. New types of media seem to pop up daily.

The point is, that to be confident in a world where nearly everything you do on line can be misinterpreted, slanted, or broadcast to audiences you didn't want it to go to, or that you didn't even know existed. In that environment it is not just enough to know how to tweet, or blog or email. You have to know the accepted rules of each media and how those media have been misused in the past. You have to know how they interrelate. You have to understand not just how to communicate with the people you want to communicate with, but how to handle communications that are misdirected (wikileaks for example.)

When you remove distance from the equation you can depend on the shield of a local neighborhood, knowing that nobody two towns over will ever hear about this.
More and more, things on the internet are also permanent. They can come back decades later to be reckoned with.
Also, there are no agents, editors and publishers to save you from putting down the wrong phrase. Once you press submit, you thoughts spread without your control.

Digital Literacy?There's a lot more here than reading and writing. or for that matter knowing how to podcast or make a video.

[Belinha De Abreu]

David: You make some excellent points. It certainly provides more food for thought on how digital literacy is conceptualized and the terms themselves. Thank you for your post. -Belinha

[Deb Kaczmar]

Digital Literacy is also discerning what should or should not be done when editing a image in digital editing software. It should also include encompass common right in regards to using resources found online. Attached is a link to my school website that consists of "Wordles" my students created on Digital Citizenship including Digital Literacy.

Wordle: Digital Citizenship