3 posts tagged “digital literacy”

Some ideas after being assigned to read an article by David O'Brien: 

     The traditional meaning of “literate” is situated in print based texts.  Students who struggle with print based text are perceived as “at-risk” or in need of “remediation,” regardless of their competence with other kinds of texts. O’Brien argues that we should “reframe the way students usually positioned as incompetent modify their identities of competence—their abilities to tackle challenging tasks, and to persevere in engaging in future similar tasks.” In other words, if a kid has a lot of confidence in his ability to succeed in Zelda, can that student’s feeling of competence, self-efficacy, help-seeking behavior, (etc., etc.) be transferred from participating in video game text to print based text? O’Brien says yes.  Furthermore, he argues that the literate world is moving in a digital or hybridized direction anyway, so inevitably, we’re going to have to merge our understanding of print and digital literacy.  Why not start now with the Zelda kid?
    Motivation research shows that kids’ views of their own competence relate to the value they place upon tasks in our classrooms.  If they don’t think they can do it, it’s a dumb assignment. O’Brien says this is about attribution—“to what does one attribute personal success or failure?”  In O’Brien’s construct of attribution, there are four possible answers.

• Ability.  Struggling readers attribute failure to lack of ability, which they think won’t change.  However, ability in the context of digital literacy is viewed as competence with authoring software, which is changeable, rehearsable, and within students’ control.
• Effort.  While struggling readers seem to think their effort doesn’t have anything to do with success or failure on standards based tasks (like reaching a new grade level on a reading assessment), they perceive their levels of effort as leading to success or failure in mastery-oriented tasks (like learning new software to create a media project). Believing that trying harder will lead to success increases the likelihood of students engaging in activities and seeking help.
• Task Difficulty.  Tasks are viewed as stable and outside of students’ control.  Students attribute failure this way:  it’s just too hard for me.  If students can construct a “doable” task, they can “view success as attributable to effort”—meaning if the task is their own idea they have the perception that they can do it and will be more motivated to try it.
• Strategies. Since text and ability are perceived as unchangeable, struggling readers are unlikely to know about or use reading strategies. As a task, authoring media texts is perceived as flexible and complex, occurring in stages that lend themselves to strategies—mode switching, hyperlinking, using tools within an application, revising aesthetically and recursively during drafting and composing.

WebQuest or Internet Busy Work?

Bernie Dodge from San Diego State University is widely credited with having created the concept of WebQuests in 1995.  In the past decade or so, educators have generated criteria that differentiate an authentic WebQuest from other uses of the Internet. A WebQuest

• focuses on a relevant, interesting, real world task
• is a scaffolded learning experience
• requires higher-order thinking
• makes good use of Internet resources
• inspires confidence in achieving success

Tom March (mentored by Bernie Dodge) claims that such criteria may be too simplistic because they overlook the Webquest's underlying pedagogy of transformative learning. In addressing the question what are webquests really?, March writes that "The main critical attribute of a WebQuest is to facilitate this transformation of information into a newly constructed, assimilated understanding."  webquests_tom_march.pdf

As literacy lessons, well-designed WebQuests offer opptortunities for guided and independent online reading and writing.

Locating or Creating WebQuests 

Various websites offer rubrics for evaluation of WebQuests, resources for creating WebQuests, templates for WebQuests, and sample WebQuests for professional development.

SDSU maintains a searchable database of WebQuests created for a variety of content areas, as does Zunal.com. (Never having designed an authentic webquest before, I would choose to follow zWebQuest's procedures to draft my own WebQuest rather than adapt an existing one.)

Browsing though online samples, most WebQuests seem to include these sections (as links in a sidebar):

Selfe, Mareck, and Gardiner are telling me that "At this point in history, by and large, our children are raised from infancy on the compelling images of the TV set, the video game, and the computer.  Alphabetic literacy for our children is often experienced as an add-on, a curious school-based task that seems to have little relevance outside the classroom."  I'm not really scared by this, as I was at the beginning of the semester. I'm sort of content to let it happen.  But I am overwhelmed by it, and it makes me want to retire.

I love my "semiotic domain."  I've been teaching for 13 years and have only recently really come to understand and perfect how I'm teaching reading and writing.  I've figured out how to convince my reluctant students how to see themselves as writers instead of paragraph spewers. I just really want to freeze time and hang out here. As confident as I am, I know there's more to learn about what I'm doing already.  I'm excited to build some sense of expertise here and now before I move on to the demands of the near future.  Would that be a disservice to my students?

Selfe and her colleagues also say that "...success in a world of rapid technological change may well depend on the ability to develop new literacy practices..."  and that  I am probably "steadfastly [abiding] by the mythic conventions of the postfigurative literacy yardstick by which [I myself am] measured."

I love teaching because I am at heart addicted to learning.  But I don't want to learn this fast.  Is it time already for me to step out of the classroom, get out of the way and let the digital revolution begin?

Resources

Selfe, Cynthia L. and  Gail E. Sawisher, eds. Gaming Lives in the Twenty-First Century.  New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007.

Selfe, Cynthia L., Mareck, Anne F. and Josh Gardiner.  "Computer Gaming as Literacy." Gaming Lives in the Twenty-First Century.  New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007, pp. 21-35.