Reflection Series: Digital Literacy

The first topic of the Reflection Series for CDLC001 assessment task 1 is Digital Literacy.

During the first week we have learnt about digital literacy, including the general definition of digital literacy, the challenges and the skills in the digital environment and multimodality in terms of communications. Through the readings provided, we explored the ideas in relation with the current events and the real world that some of the points in the articles are happening or being applied into practices.

Digital literacy mentions eight main skills that you need to know in order to be considered as “digital literate”, which is information or data literacy, media literacy, media fluency, digital creativity and innovation, affective and emotional intelligence, career and online profile management, digital scholarship and digital learning and development. From my personal view, those skills are necessary to be learnt because it gives us an idea of how to search, evaluate, analyse and store the information they found using the digital tools. Furthermore, we are not only consuming the media but also communicating with people using the media by creating new contents online and being able to manage our profile and digital settings. The reading of Pullman & Ventimiglia (2016) also discussed the switch from written literacy to the new digital literacy where students need to learn about digital literacy to find solutions for academic purposes, for example self-teaching or browsing for various academic articles as their secondary source of information and represent their research in variety of ways.

Then we discovered about the challenges and the skills that are popping up in the digital era, referring to Jenkins et al. (2015) research. For instance, the transparency problem is my obstacle when using the media as sometimes I unconsciously adapt the opinion from the Youtubers about life advices that I forget it is a mass opinion that is dominant but I can disagree with, and I need to learn all the new skills so that I am able to use the media as a tool and consume the online content properly.

Reference:

Pullman, G. & Ventimiglia, P. (2016). From Written to Digital: The new literacy. Educause Review.