My heart froze as I saw the woman in the audience’s neutral listening expression turn into a frown. I had just finished up a chipper talk on defining digital literacy, making the case, I thought rather convincingly, that when we plan digital literacy initiatives on college campuses, we have to think from a holistic perspective.
Being digitally literate is not just about being able to code. It’s not just about being able to build an app. It’s not even just about being able to understand how a computer works. It’s also about understanding how communication and cultural ecosystems operate online and being able to name the moves happening in those spaces. It’s also about knowing HOW to participate in online spaces and what the norms are for operating in different social spaces, mediated through digital platforms.
Yet I could feel the skepticism in the room. If you’ve never experienced a skeptical audience before you, it’s similar to what you might experience when you give someone a present, thinking they’ll like it, only to see their faces drop in disappointment. You think you got them something awesome, but they think it totally sucks. Same kind of moment: I thought I had dropped an awesome knowledge bomb and they thought I was out of my mind.
I reacted in the same way that I might when I’ve given someone a gift that I realize is actually crappy: I overcompensated with kindness.
“It looks like you have a question!” I chirped as I signaled at the woman with the frown on her face. “What sorts of concerns do you have about digital literacy?”
“Well.” She took a deep breath. I smiled. Broadly. “I just don’t really understand how you’re defining learning. ”
I buy myself a moment of time: “Wow, yes, ‘learning,’ well, it’s a big, big concept.” I laugh. Hoo boy.
I knew immediately what she was referring to: in an opening slide, I showed some data from the recent EDUCAUSE Survey of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, which displayed what I thought was a pretty noteworthy discrepancy between the percentage of students who own smartphones and laptops and the percentage of students who reported using these devices in their classes. The numbers are dramatic: 95% of college students own smartphones, yet only 38% report using a smartphone as a “learning tool in class.” (These particular numbers are reflected on page 26 of the study in Figure 6). So, she was wondering what use cases students might want to use smartphones as a “learning tool.” She followed up by asking if note-taking was considered a “learning” activity and my first, instinctive reaction was, “Well, the study doesn’t really name note-taking as a learning activity explicitly.”
I wasn’t wrong about that, but it wasn’t exactly the right answer to her question either. I realized minutes later (of course, minutes too late) that the answer was actually quite simple: the survey was really just trying to gauge what students considered “learning activities” in the first place.
By simply asking students whether they had used a smartphone or a laptop for a “learning activity” what the survey was really trying to get at was whether students perceived that they were using devices for digital learning. As educators, we could talk all day about which ways of learning are best for our students, but above all, we should ask the learners themselves what works for their learning. In this case, they clearly weren’t seeing that many use cases where smartphones were, in fact, leveraged for learning.
Getting to this moment in responding to the audience member’s skepticism was important for me because it helped me understand something larger that I had been struggling with in conversations about “digital literacy” and even “21st century learning:” to what extent are digital literacy initiatives meeting students where they are? Even if instructors are being thoughtful about how they are asking students to use laptops or mobile devices in their classes, to what extent are we making this value visible to our students? In other words, how are we garnering buy-in and motivation to develop the competencies and habits of mind that we, as educators and learning designers, value?
I don’t have a good answer to that question, though I think there are some strategies we could use to leverage better buy-in for aligning digital literacy, as a broader set of cultural and critical competencies with the content that we’re already teaching in our classes. Specifically, I think, as instructors, we can always explain why we’re facilitating particular activities in particular spaces in our classes. Our spaces are not invisible, and everyone knows it. The way an activity might happen online will be different than how it happens in-person. That doesn’t mean it’s better or worse; it’s just different. So, we should acknowledge how those differences change both the work we’re doing and the outcomes of that work.
After all, if a major component of digital literacy is the ability to recognize the changing cultural constructs and contexts of our work, then we should start by pointing out those changed contexts in our classes and name what’s changing. Even better, we can ask our students what changes they notice and how those impact them. While aspects of digital spaces may be invisible to our students, we can help our students detect what’s invisible to them – and make them visible. That’s what a good seminar can ideally accomplish.
Even when we are talking about “coding” as a component of developing digital literacy, educators in computer science and other adjacent fields could do more to explain the contexts for particular coding languages, helping students to situate why particular languages matter in some contexts and not others and what certain codes allow people to do – socially speaking – more than other languages. Granted, my coding knowledge needs some significant beefing up, but something that has helped me
learn technical concepts more clearly in my own experience is when I am able to contextualize those concepts into practices that matter to me.
So, I’ll leave us on two thoughts here: if we are going to say that “21st century skills” or “digital literacy” skills matter, we have to think about how we’re communicating those skills to our students and make sure that what we consider learning is also what they consider learning too. We should aim for alignment between instructor and student expectations, an alignment that can be achieved through transparent conversations and honest exchange. That means trusting each other, a skill that will always have futures-facing, transferable benefits. For everyone.