Digital Literacy for St. Cloud State University
https://library.educause.edu/-/media/files/library/2021/4/eli7177.pdf
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more about digital divide in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=%22digital+divide%22
The FCC extended assistance that started during the pandemic
There’s more funding on the way to close the digital divide in the US. The new $1 trillion infrastructure law includes $65 billion to boost broadband access. More than 30 million Americans live somewhere without adequate broadband infrastructure, according to a Biden administration fact sheet.
https://www.dhakacourier.com.bd/news/Essays/Using-social-media-platforms-in-teaching-learning/1051
Dr. Jon Dron and Professor Terry Anderson of Athabasca University, Canada attempt to introduce a new model for understanding and exploiting the pedagogical potential of Web-based technologies. Recognizing the E-learning/ online education as new model of teaching and learning, the authors show how learners can engage with social media platforms to create an unbounded field of emergent connections.
In chapter 9 ‘Issues and Challenges in Educational Uses of Social Software’ , the writers accordingly examine the dark side of social software—the ways in which it can undermine or even jeopardize, rather than deepen and extend, the experience of learning. They present a series of over-arching issues that warrant consideration by anyone who plans to use social software for learning. These include issues surrounding privacy, disclosure, and trust, cross-cultural dissonances, problems posed by the complexities of technology and by the digital divide, unpredictable systemic effects, and risks such as mob stupidity and filter bubbles.
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more on social media in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=social+media
3Mbps uploads still fast enough for US homes, Ajit Pai says in final report from r/technology
Rosenworcel said that Pai’s report obscures “the hard truth that the digital divide is very real and very big” and that “it confounds logic that today the FCC decides to release a report that says that broadband is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion.”
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more on netneutrality in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=netneutrality
CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN AN AGE OF ONLINE LEARNING
Paulo Freire and Critical Pedagogy
Freire’s pedagogical concepts, such as problem posing, dialogue, praxis, conscientiazation and the politics of education, were devel-oped in a pre-Internet era. His work in popular education was deeply interpersonal and involved spending significant time in a community becoming familiar with the culture, linguistic patterns, and lifestyle of the people before ever embarking on teaching.
struggles to employ a critical pedagogy in the increasingly assessment-oriented, outcomes-based environment
While designed to make teaching in the online environment more efficient, these systems confront the critical pedagogue with challenges to create a teaching-learning environment that promotes critical reflection not only on the content of a course but on the very way in which content is delivered.
teaching in cyberspace requires a different teaching paradigm altogether
p. 170 Feenberg (2009) developed the Critical Theory of Technology (CTT),
p. 171 As outlined by CTT, technology creates a cyber culture that redefines human identity and the meaning and means of human interaction (Gomez, 2009). When viewed through this lens, online education is not simply another tool for the promotion of learning, but rather an all-encompassing environment managing and controlling access to information, structuring relationships, and redefining individual identities.
p. 171 While masquerading as efforts to enhance student learning, these industries are clearly profit-oriented. Knowledge has become a commodity, students have become consumers, faculty have become content providers, and schools operate as businesses
p. 172 Like Feenberg (2009), Freire would be concerned with the values and principles embedded in the technology of online learning, as well as the cyber culture it has created.
p. 173 Schools did not venture into online learning because they thought it was a better way to teach, but rather because they saw it as a way to reach unreached student populations with the promise of off-site educational offerings. Only later was attention given to developing online pedagogies.
Whereas education in the United States was originally viewed as a way to prepare students for effective citizenship, now it is seen as a way to develop loyal and capable employees of their corporate overlords
p. 174 A second area of concern is the banking nature of the LMSs. One of the underlying assumptions of an LMS like Blackboard™, Moodle™, or Brightspace™ is that the online platform is a repository of resources for teaching and learning.
Freire vehemently rejected this banking approach to education because it did not recognize or encourage the student’s creative, exploratory, and critical abilities. In the banking model the teacher is regarded as the holder and transmitter of knowledge, which is then imparted to the student. The banking model assumes the student is an empty vessel and does not value or recognize the student’s experiential and cultural knowledge
By contrast Freire argued for a problem-posing, constructivist approach that invites students to critically engage their world and one another. In the critical classroom, the student at times takes on the role of teacher and the teacher becomes a learner, inviting a sharing of power and mutual learning. While this approach can be carried out to an extent online, the LMS is set up to be the primary source of information in a course, and the teacher is assigned as the expert designer of the learning experience, thus limiting the constructivist nature and mutuality of the learning process.
p. 175 A third area of concern is the limited access to online learning to large sectors of society. While e-learning advocates tout the greater access to learning provided by online learning (Goral, 2013; Kashi & Conway, 2010), the digital divide is a reality impacting millions of students.
p. 176 A final area of concern is the disembodied nature of the online learning process. One of the major attractions of online learning to potential students is the freedom from having to be in a classroom in a particular time or place.
p. 177 Embodied learning means students must not only engage the cognitive dimension (thinking and reflection), but also partake in concrete action. This action in reflection, and reflection in action, referred to as praxis, involves acting on and in the world as one is seeking to learn about and transform the world.
To limit education to the transmission and reception of text-based knowledge without action undermines the entire learning process (Escobar et al., 1994).
Freire believed dialogue begins not with what the teacher professes to know, but with the student’s experience and knowledge.
p. 179 For Freire, the building of a learning community is essential to creating meaningful dialogue; this is also true for those who seek to teach effectively online. Palloff and Pratt (2007) contend that all online teaching must begin with building community and stress that a carefully constructed online learning community provides a space for students to test ideas, get feedback, and create a collaborative learning experience.
For Freire, learning was a social and democratic event where authoritarianism and control of the learning process are minimized.
“reading the world,” or conscientization, that is, understanding the larger political context in which experience occurs and knowledge is situated. In the current era of Facebook, Twitter, instant message, and other social media, in-depth discussion and analysis is often absent in favor of brief, often innocuous statements and personal opinions.
Through online academic databases, students have easy access to far more sources of information than previous generations. Furthermore, search engines like Google, Yahoo, and the like bring students in contact with remote sources, organizations, and individuals instantly.
p. 180 the challenge is not only the accessing of information, but also encouraging students to become discerning purveyors of information—to develop “critical digital literacy,” the capacity to effectively and critically navigate the databases and myriads of potential sources (Poore, 2011, p. 15)
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more on online teaching in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=online+teaching
Enrique Dans ITORS’ PICK|28,492 views|
Classes that will continue as best they can, voluntarism, online teaching seen simply as a side dish, students without access to computers or an internet connection, teachers who simply assign essays based on reading material, or measures such as a universal pass have become sadly common.
The change will be permanent: educational activity will no longer be face-to-face or online but a blend, able to move from one to another immediately fluidly, continually, through a student’s life, way beyond the school, college or university years.
Firstly, we need to resolve the so-called digital divide
Secondly, this will mean that teachers must reconsider all their methodologies and prepare them for this new, blended learning environment.
Thirdly, institutions, both educational and normative, must understand that, in this new context, some ways of teaching no longer make sense.
Online teaching will not consist of turning a handle while students learn on their own. On the contrary: it will require teachers to engage more than ever, who will spend many hours in forums moderating conversations and opening new threads.
organized by LIT Limerick Institute of Technology, Ireland; Bihac, Bosnia
Conference main themes and topics https://www.wbimlc.org/topics
Information Literacy in the modern world
From Information Literacy to Digital Scholarship
Fake News and Information Literacy
Information literacies (media literacy, Research Literacy, digital literacy, visual literacy, financial literacy, health literacy, cyber wellness, infographics, information behavior, trans-literacy, post-literacy)
Information Literacy and academic libraries
Information Literacy and adult education
Information Literacy and blended learning
Information Literacy and distance learning
Information Literacy and mobile devices
Information Literacy and Gamification
Information Literacy and public libraries
Information Literacy in Primary and Secondary Schools
Information Literacy and the Knowledge Economy
Information Literacy and Lifelong Learning
Information Literacy and the Information Society
Information Literacy and the Multimedia Society
Information Literacy and the Digital Society
Information Literacy in the modern world (e.g trends, emerging technologies and innovation, growth of digital resources, digital reference tools, reference services).
The future of Information Literacy
Workplace Information Literacy
Librarians as support to the lifelong learning process
Digital literacy, Digital Citizenship
Digital pedagogy and Information Literacy
Information Literacy Needs in the Electronic Resource Environment
Integrating Information Literacy into the curriculum
Putting Information Literacy theory into practice
Information Literacy training and instruction
Instructional design and performance for Information Literacy (e.g. teaching practice, session design, lesson plans)
Information Literacy and online learning (e.g. self-paced IL modules, online courses, Library Guides)
Information Literacy and Virtual Learning Environments
Supporting users need through library 2.0 and beyond
Digital empowerment and reference work
Information Literacy across the disciplines
Information Literacy and digital preservation
Innovative IL approaches
Student engagement with Information Literacy
Action Literacy
Information Literacy, Copyright and Intellectual Property
Information Literacy and Academic Writing
Media and Information Literacy – theoretical approaches (standards, assessment, collaboration, etc.)
The Digital Competence Framework 2.0
Information Literacy theory (models, standards, indicators, Moscow Declaration etc.)
Information Literacy and Artificial intelligence
Information Literacy and information behavior
Information Literacy and reference services: cyber reference services, virtual reference services, mobile reference services
Information Literacy cultural and contextual approaches
Information Literacy and Threshold concepts
Information Literacy evaluation and assessment
Information Literacy in different cultures and countries including national studies
Information Literacy project management
Measuring in Information Literacy instruction assessment
New aspects of education/strategic planning, policy, and advocacy for Information Literacy in a digital age
Information Literacy and the Digital Divide
Policy and Planning for Information Literacy
Branding, promotion and marketing for Information Literacy
Cross –sectorial; and interdisciplinary collaboration and partnerships for Information Literacy
Leadership and Governance for Information Literacy
Strategic planning for IL
Strategies in e-learning to promote self-directed and sustainable learning in the area of Information Literacy skills.
A 2016 Pew Research Center study indicates that the digital divide in the United States is not solely about access to technology; it also is about the ability to use technology to get what we need.1 What does digital readiness mean; applying cumulative knowledge to real-world situations. Having a tech or STEM-related degree does not ensure digital readiness.
How Can We Encourage Digital Agility in the Liberal Arts?
Digital pedagogy often creates opportunities for instructors to create non-disposable assignments—assignments that are not designed to be thrown away but rather have a purpose past being required.3
“We need to marry the best of our academic work with the best of edtech. In other words, what would it look like if education technology were embedded in the everyday practice of academic disciplines?”4
Project-based learning fits well within the curricular flexibility of the liberal arts. In project-based work, students apply what they are learning in the context of an engaging experience.
Building off frameworks that are already in place, like the Association for College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy,
External-facing work offers students real situations where, if we imagine what digital agility looks like, they have to adjust to possible new digital environments and approaches.
Reflection provides a way for meaning-making to happen across individual assignments, projects, and classes. Without the chance to assemble assignments into a larger narrative, each experience lives in its own void.
How Can Institutions Build Systems-Level Support?
Liberal arts colleges in particular are interested in the ways they prepare graduates to be agile and critical in a digital world—as seen in the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE) Rubrics.
he Bryn Mawr Digital Competencies Framework5 was followed by more formal conversations and the formation of a working group (including Carleton College,
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more on digital fluency in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=digital+fluency
INTERESTING TO CONSIDER: The Radical Transformation of the Textbook #highered #edtech #OER #opened https://t.co/5GpPHUgCSe
— OER Digest (@OERdigest) August 27, 2019
https://www.wired.com/story/digital-textbooks-radical-transformation/
Pearson “digital first” strategy.
My note: see our postings
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2018/07/09/pearson-selling-us-k12-business/
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2019/04/19/change-in-the-k12-sector/
It also enables Pearson to staunch the bleeding caused by an explosion in the second-hand market. A company called Chegg launched the first major online textbook rental service in 2007; Amazon followed suit in 2012. Both advertise savings of up to 90 percent off the sticker price.
But more technology doesn’t always mean better results. Within K-12 learning environments, the digital divide means that students in low-income and rural households have less access to reliable internet and fewer connected deviceson which to complete the online portions of their homework. And while Pearson’s initiative applies only to textbooks in higher ed, the shift to digital has implications at the collegiate level as well.
Just as traditional software has a thriving open source community, textbooks have Open Educational Resources, complete textbooks that typically come free of charge digitally, or for a small fee—enough to cover the printing—in hard copy. And while it’s not an entirely new concept, OER has gained momentum in recent years, particularly as support has picked up at an institutional level, rather than on a course by course basis. According to a 2018 Babson College survey, faculty awareness of OER jumped from 34 percent to 46 percent since 2015.
One of OER’s leading proponents is OpenStax, a nonprofit based out of Rice University that offers a few dozen free textbooks, covering everything from AP Biology to Principles of Accounting. In the 2019–2020 academic year, 2.7 million students across 6,600 institutions used an OpenStax product instead of a for-profit equivalent.
The knock against OER is that, well, you get what you pay for. “One faculty member told me only half-jokingly, that OER is like a puppy that’s free. You get the free puppy, but then you have to do all the work,” says Cengage’s Hansen, who argues that traditional publishers provide critical supporting materials, like assessment questions, that OER often lacks, and can push more regular updates.
By virtue of being free, OER materials also heavily skew toward digital, with hardcover as a secondary option. (Or you can download the PDF and print it out yourself.) The same caveats about efficacy apply. But at least OER doesn’t lock you into one digital platform, the way the major publishers do. OpenStax alone counts around 50 ecosystem partners to provide homework and testing support.
Or you could always split the difference.
That’s the territory Cengage wants to stake out. Late last summer, the educational publishing behemoth—it announced a planned merger with McGraw Hill in May; the combined company would surpass all but Pearson in market capitalization—rolled out Cengage Unlimited, a “Netflix for Textbooks” model that rolls all textbook rentals and digital platform access into a single rate: $120 for a semester, $180 for a full year, or $240 for two years. Almost a year in, the US-only program has a million subscribers.
My note: more about Cengage and McGraw Hill in this blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2017/06/22/textbook-model/
this added Sept 13, 2019:
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more on textbooks in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=textbooks
Jan 5, 2017danah boyd
https://points.datasociety.net/did-media-literacy-backfire-7418c084d88d
Understanding what sources to trust is a basic tenet of media literacy education.
Think about how this might play out in communities where the “liberal media” is viewed with disdain as an untrustworthy source of information…or in those where science is seen as contradicting the knowledge of religious people…or where degrees are viewed as a weapon of the elite to justify oppression of working people. Needless to say, not everyone agrees on what makes a trusted source.
Students are also encouraged to reflect on economic and political incentives that might bias reporting. Follow the money, they are told. Now watch what happens when they are given a list of names of major power players in the East Coast news media whose names are all clearly Jewish. Welcome to an opening for anti-Semitic ideology.
In the United States, we believe that worthy people lift themselves up by their bootstraps. This is our idea of freedom. To take away the power of individuals to control their own destiny is viewed as anti-American by so much of this country. You are your own master.
Children are indoctrinated into this cultural logic early, even as their parents restrict their mobility and limit their access to social situations. But when it comes to information, they are taught that they are the sole proprietors of knowledge. All they have to do is “do the research” for themselves and they will know better than anyone what is real.
Combine this with a deep distrust of media sources.
Many marginalized groups are justifiably angry about the ways in which their stories have been dismissed by mainstream media for decades.It took five days for major news outlets to cover Ferguson. It took months and a lot of celebrities for journalists to start discussing the Dakota Pipeline. But feeling marginalized from news media isn’t just about people of color.
Keep in mind that anti-vaxxers aren’t arguing that vaccinations definitively cause autism. They are arguing that we don’t know. They are arguing that experts are forcing children to be vaccinated against their will, which sounds like oppression. What they want is choice — the choice to not vaccinate. And they want information about the risks of vaccination, which they feel are not being given to them. In essence, they are doing what we taught them to do: questioning information sources and raising doubts about the incentives of those who are pushing a single message. Doubt has become tool.
Addressing so-called fake news is going to require a lot more than labeling. It’s going to require a cultural change about how we make sense of information, whom we trust, and how we understand our own role in grappling with information. Quick and easy solutions may make the controversy go away, but they won’t address the underlying problems.
In the United States, we’re moving towards tribalism (see Fukuyama), and we’re undoing the social fabric of our country through polarization, distrust, and self-segregation.
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John Palfrey, Urs Gasser: Born Digital
Digital Natives share a common global culture that is defined not by age, strictly, but by certain attributes and experience related to how they interact with information technologies, information itself, one another, and other people and institutions. Those who were not “born digital’ can be just as connected, if not more so, than their younger counterparts. And not everyone born since, say 1982, happens to be a digital native.” (see also https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2018/04/15/no-millennials-gen-z-gen-x/
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more on media literacy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=media+literacy
fake news in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=fake+news