Understanding and supporting students' digital

literacies

Martin Oliver & Jude Fransman

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Overview

• What’s so important about ‘digital literacy’?• An introduction to the JISC project• What we have been doing, and how• Themes and issues• What this might mean for you• What this all might mean for the IOE

– Slides available from diglitpga.jiscinvolve.org/– References included in slide notes

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Context: digital who?

• Prensky, Tapscott, Oblinger & Oblinger– Digital natives, Net generation, Generation Y,

Millenials…

• We know our learners, and they’re not us (even down to how their brains work)

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Some have surmised that teenagers use different parts of their brain and think in different ways than adults when at the computer. We now know that it goes even further—their brains are almost certainly physiologically different. […]Digital Natives accustomed to the twitch-speed, multitasking, random-access, graphics-first, active, connected, fun, fantasy, quick-payoff world of their video games, MTV, and Internet are bored by most of today’s education, well meaning as it may be. […]The cognitive differences of the Digital Natives cry out for new approaches to education with a better fit.‖ And, interestingly enough, it turns out that one of the few structures capable of meeting the Digital Natives’ changing learning needs and requirements is the very video and computer games they so enjoy. This is why Digital Game-Based Learning is beginning to emerge and thrive.

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• There are trends, but no generational differencesRather than being empirically and theoretically informed, the debate can be likened to an academic form of a ‘moral panic’

(Bennett, Maton & Kervin, 2008)

• Most students use whatever the course requires them to (…but are inconsistent in what they think is “required”…)

• There are important exceptions to engagement– E.g. minorities who engage in different ways, in the UK

and internationally(Jones, Ramanau, Cross & Healing, 2010; Czerniewicz, Williams & Brown, 2009)

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Context: digital what?

• ‘Digital literacy’ pushed nationally but ambiguous– Functional access– Skills development – Situated practices– Creative appropriation / identity work

(Sharpe & Beetham, 2010)

• Also argued that digital literacies should be understood as textual, not technological, practices

(Jones & Lea, 2008)

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• A cluster of issues:– Skills development for ‘economic competitiveness’– Development of critical and research skills– Many stick to the basics rather than explore possibilities– Most learners are still strongly led by tutors and course practices– ‘Clash’ between informal practices and academic norms

There is a tension between recognising an 'entitlement' to basic digital literacy, and recognising technology practice as diverse and constitutive of personal identity, including identity in different peer, subject and workplace communities, and individual styles of participation.

(Beetham, McGill & Littlejohn, 2009)

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JISC project overview

• Digital Literacies programme, 10 projects– http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/

developingdigitalliteracies/developingdigitalliteraciesprog.aspx

• “Digital literacies as a postgraduate attribute”• 2-year funded project– 1st year, student research– 2nd year, implementation projects

• What do our students do and need?• What can we change to help them?

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Project team

Jude FransmanLesley GourlaySusan McGrathMartin OliverGwyneth Price

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Year one: student research

• Start broad and shallow; go deeper– Review of existing data via iGraduate– Focus groups– Journalling study

• Introduce each in turn

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iGraduate review

• Almost nothing about students’ identity– Blackboard ‘confusing’, library ‘fantastic’

• More on study practices– Want more discussion with peers, tutors– Concerns about lack of timely response to

accommodation emails, and “ridiculous” password change policy

• Little on skills– Requests for orientation sessions

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• Lots about access– Delays getting into VLE (up to two weeks)– Not enough open access computers– Sign on frustratingly slow (up to 20 minutes)– Not all students can access online course info– Frustration about internet access – particularly

WiFi – and blocking Skype etc.– Request for out-of-hours IT support

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Focus Groups

• Aims: to identify course-specific issues/themes • Methodology: – 3 face-to-face focus groups held with PGCE, MA and

PhD students– +1 online focus group with Distance MRes students

via Elluminate– Selection: spread across courses, demographics and

between part-time/full-time students– Challenges (coordinating the PGCE group)

• Focus on resources, domains, practices, identities

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Domains and Resources

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Well, in my bedroom, on my bed, it's mainly my mobile and going through my emails, travel

information, whether on Facebook, my mobile too. Then, um, and in the study room, that

would be my laptop and, um, laptop, that would be Blackboard, research, entertainment.

(MA student)

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Emerging issues

• Who controls access to domains/resources?• How are resources defined as appropriate to one

domain or another? (E.g. for study/work socialising) • How do resources function differently in different

domains? (E.g. using IOE email in the library/ at home)

• How do resources in particular domains configure students relationally? (E.g. Elluminate/Skype)

• How do resources connect to other resources? (E.g. Googledocs => Skype)

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Digital Practices

With the forums, I think I would have found that very difficult to track posting because when we’re meant to be looking at all the different conversations and participating, I would have found that too time-

consuming to trawl through. So, what I found more helpful is just... Obviously you get the e-mail alerts from any forums that you’re

involved in and so I just, you know, check those occasionally and look at all the stuff that’s coming in and make a mental note and then just

go in maybe once a day and reply to the ones that relate to me rather than having to search around the forums themselves. So,

that’s how I’ve handled it but I just kind of did that as my own system.

(OMRes student)

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Emerging issues

• Searching for and managing information (access/awareness/filtering strategies etc.)

• Learning how to use new resources (e.g. Interactive Whiteboards)

• Identifying the right resource for the task• Problems with software/hardware/

infrastructure• Who has responsibility for addressing technical

problems?

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Student Identities

The only thing I struggle with, like I just mentioned it earlier before, is the issue of like keeping your private life separate from your work life because I think increasingly the two, you're being forced to kind

of mush the two together. Because like Birkbeck used to have its own email server and it would provide you with an email. Now it’s provided by Gmail and it’s like everybody knows that Gmail is the

nosiest thing in the world and tracks absolutely everything you do. And […] I'm a little bit uncomfortable with the idea that my work

email knows what shopping I do and, you know what I mean? I just find the whole thing is starting to get a little bit scary.

(PhD student)

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Emerging issues

• Do digital resources (e.g. VLEs or platforms like Facebook/Skype etc.) segregate or merge student/social/professional identities?

• How do students relate to the university as an institution? (E.g. physical building; website; institutional email account; representatives such as exam centres or tutors)

• How are students configured or how do they configure themselves as learning communities (E.g. Blackboard/Facebook/Skype/face-to-face meetings etc.)

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Longitudinal journaling

• Aims: To generate in-depth multimodal data on student’s digital practices in each of the 4 courses

• Methodology– Methodology piloted by the three researchers– 3 students selected from each course (12 in total)– 3 interviews with regular contact in between to discuss data

collection – Interest in data collected, representation of data and

process of data-collection– Analyzed according to students’ own theorisations of their

data– Methodology mediated by the device (iPod Touch)

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Mapping spaces and resources

http://youtu.be/3IXGspusiWU

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Access

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Print literacies

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Digital/digitised texts

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• Challenges with resources and strategies to resolve them

o Knowledge and skillso Problems with technology/

infrastructureo Learningo Institutional and informal support

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• Feelings of belonging/isolation in different spaces mediated by resources

The sense of community is much stronger at my new school. People stay at work later- at the old school everyone left early. And at the old school we weren’t given any work

space in the English department so we had to work in the staff room but at the new one we have desks so we really feel connected to the department. And its great because

everyone works at their desks and then for lunch they have ‘turn-in’ time when we all move our chairs away from our

desks and eat together in a circle.

(PGCE student)

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How are students processing and representing their data?

• Different multimodal writing practices (e.g. handwritten journal in notebook V virtual notebook apps)

• Video used in different ways (e.g. audio explanation of images; capturing moving images; capturing sound and ambience)

Emerging methodological/ conceptual issues

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Domains: access and control

• Reluctance to use inscribed iPod in public• Reluctance to use certain modes of data

collection in certain spaces (e.g. camera in IOE library because prohibited; video in public galleries because of legal issues or school placements because of personal discomfit)

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So, what might this mean for you?

• Just a small window on a complex picture

• A few minutes for discussion:• What does this look like from your position?– What technologies do you require students to use?– How do you react when they don’t?– Where and when do they do this? (Do you know?)– What do they struggle with or get concerned about?– What could we (all) do to help them?

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What might this mean for the IOE?

• Your feedback:– What should we be aware of in the project?– What needs to be fed back to committees,

services, etc?– What do teachers, learners and support staff need

to do differently?

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Thanks

For more about the project, including access to the slides from this session,go to: diglitpga.jiscinvolve.org