Sunday, May 22, 2011

Digital Literacy

Session 1 
Wikipedia defines Digital literacy as " the ability to locate, organize, understand, evaluate, and analyze information using digital technology. It involves a working knowledge of current high technology, and an understanding of how it can be used. Digitally literate people can communicative and work more efficiently, especially with those who possess the same knowledge and skills."  It explains that "research around digital literacy is concerned with wider aspects associated with learning how to effectively find, use, summarize, evaluate, create, and communicate information while using digital technologies, not just being literate at using a computer."  
Paul Glister author of the best seller Digital Literacy (1997) pointed out that " digital literacy is the ability to understand information and, more important, to evaluate and integrate information in multiple formats that the computer can deliver.  Being able to evaluate and interpret information is critical...  you can´t understand information you find on the Internet without evaluating its sources and placing it in context".  

Therefore, we can conclude that digital literacy is much more than using a computer, it is a tight relationship between accessing information, evaluating it critically,  processing it and sharing it with a community in an efficient way.  It is important to point out that the use of different electronic devices apart from computers is also relevant to open the scope of the definition.   Nowadays it is vital to be digitally literate in order to keep up to date with the process of teaching and learning a foreign language.  In the case of Venezuela, there is a lot to do in order to rebuild our teaching-learning environment.  Most of our students have a mobile phone, the majority of them have access to internet in the form of social networks so why not using such tools for improving and updating their learning process?  The question is how and I´m sure that we will start knowing from this class on,  I hope that by the end of this course, we start to use one ICT tool in our classrooms.

References

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