This is a first attempt at synthesizing a number of Digital Literacy frameworks into something that I feel I can take to teachers to help them build Digital Literacy capacity in their classrooms. The frameworks I have looked at include:
BC Draft Digital Literacy Standards
Mozilla Web Literacy Standards
Brennan’s Framework for … Development of Computational Thinking
Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay’s Digital Citizenship framework
TPACK framework
One of my frustrations with Digital Literacy frameworks from a teaching perspective is that they tend to lump together skills that need to be taught in different ways. For example, Digital Etiquette and Respect can only truly be learned in real life situations where mentoring and guidance is available and it is ok to make mistakes. No teenager ever changed their behavior because an adult told them too.
It seems to me that the skills we need to teach students so they can be ‘digitally literate’ and the corresponding learning environments could include:
- Web Literacy
- Teaching Environment: Direct instruction and practice
- Favorite Framework: Mozilla
- Exploring – navigation, search, credibiity, security, web mechanics
- Connecting – sharing and collaborating, participation, privacy
- Problem Solving and Computational Thinking
- Teaching Environment: Messing around; maker space
- Favorite Framework: Brennan’s work on Computational Thinking and Mozilla’s ‘Building’ strand
- (Brennan) Computational Concepts, Practices, Perspectives
- (Mozilla) Composing for the web, remixing, design and accessibility, coding/scripting
- Digital Etiquette and Respect
- Teaching Environment: real life experience, feedback and mentoring
- Favourite Framework: Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay Dig Cit Framework
- Digital Etiquette and Respect part
In my mind focusing on breaking Digital Literacies into skills that require different teaching environments might be a first step to building teacher’s capacity to teach these skills in the classroom. Thoughts?