Chapter 4: Why existing models of digital literacy don't work

This chapter in a nutshell

• Skills are not learned in isolation, but rather developed within a context.
• Literacies are plural and not neutral when it comes to power, social identity and political ideology.
• There is a continuum of skills, through competencies up to literacies.
• Literacies are best taught when the learner can see the whole picture of what they are learning and where they are going (‘progressive encoding’).

As we saw in the previous chapter, given the amount of ambiguity in the world it’s a wonder that human beings manage to communicate at all! One way we manage to do so is by hugely simplifying our experience — packaging it up in ways that can be understood easily by others. So, for example, instead of trying to explain what the colour ‘red’ feels like to observe, we simply agree that when we point to a stop light and say ‘red’ we’re actually talking about the same thing.

The problem comes, of course, when we need to refer to things that can’t be seen. What do we do when we need to refer to concepts such as ‘hunger’ or ‘pain’? With these we tend to infer them from what we can see. So, for example, if we put food in front of someone and they devour it quickly, we infer they were hungry. If we touch someone several times on the shoulder and they say ‘ow!’ each time, then we infer that they have a sore shoulder.

Referring to an even more meta-level concept such as ‘patriotism’ or ‘literacy’ however becomes more problematic. Actions can be interpreted in several ways depending upon your understanding of the situation. As the TV series Homeland shows, for example, the supposedly patriotic 9 actions of a soldier can be seen in a very different light when you know the truth. Likewise, when it comes to understanding ‘literacy’ we need some way of understanding what’s going on. We need a model.

The purpose of this chapter is to recognise that whilst we need conceptual models, the ones we currently have in the arena of ‘digital literacy’ are problematic. I will propose what I consider to be a better way of approaching the problem in Chapter 5, but in this chapter I first want to point out the shortcomings of existing models.