During Topic 1 we worked on Digital Literacy. Digital literacy refers to an individual’s ability to find, evaluate, and create information on various digital platforms.
One of the first steps of reaching global digital literacy is to work on the level of access to technology. Inequality network speed, economy, technical knowledge and democratic rights around the globe it is actually an obstacle toward digital development and global digital citizenship. It is obvious that lack in freedom of speech and censorship will hinder digital literacy, but even in developed democracies there are issues with different skills between generations, people with economically differences and levels of education.This is called the digital divide, and there are various levels of this divide. There is even a gender divide within the sphere of technology and digital literacy.
Big decisions need to be made considering Net neutrality, development 5thgeneration of mobile network access and privacy around the globe if we want a growth in digital literacy.
Schools, universities and actors in the educational market have made great progress in developing courses and curriculum in the strive to achieve digital literacy to meet with demands that goes hand in hand with the future development of the digital life. Despite some consensus about what the competencies are and how they can be acquired, results from international studies indicate that teaching strategies are often not well implemented in actual educational practice. The reasons for this include a lack of integration of the right competencies in curriculum and assessment, insufficient preparation of teachers and the absence of any systematic attention for strategies to adopt at scale innovative teaching and learning practices. We need to realize that there are areas that need to be looked at and that are lacking (J. Voogt, O. Erstad, C. Dede, P. Mishra, 2013)
Finally, I need to speak about the work process in PBL grup 13. And I really think that our initial problems of getting the group together, finding ways to work and meeting times are connected with digital collaboration issues. I am quite convinced that the future in educational design will include more of digital forms of work and education need to implement “distance” both in geographical distance and in timely distance. How to solve the participants social environment and to find a working social context are a key to success.
Nice reflections here Hans. I would have been interested in learning more about your thinking on ”net neutrality” and the institutions’ decisions around this. With regards to the work process of the group, do you not think that the group has managed to ”overcome” these to a greater extent now?
In fact, I would go so far as to say that the ”forming” and ”Storming” has been surpassed, and now the group is in the ”norming” stage? Right? Or do you disagree?
Anyway, I did enjoy your reflections and I look forward to reading more.
GillaGilla
This is an overview in English:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality
Yes I agree about that our group has overcome initial issues. The work is going well now
GillaGilla
Hi Hans, and first I have to say I am sorry for my late comments. You discuss digital literacy in an insightful way and even enlighten the democratic aspects of this: Not to be under estimated! You show that there can be a lot of different problems or things hindering us and that this can be categorized in different divides. Yes agree that there are big democratic issues here, especially if it is different for different groups. But how do we close this gap? You suggest that this cannot be closed with one formal course, but with seeing the bigger picture and including these competencies in all education.
You see this kind of collaboration, that we have for instance in the ONL course, a the new age for learning, and that we have to consider distance both physically and in time.
GillaGilla
If with the ONL course mean that intellectual peering, so yes. I don’t think the gap going to close, but we can work on making it closer. 🙂
GillaGilla