Chapter 5: The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies
This chapter in a nutshell
- There are many different, competing definitions of ‘digital literacies’.
- Co-created definitions have more power than those that are simply adopted or imposed.
- A definition of digital literacies can be found by applying the eight essential elements of digital literacies to a particular context.
Given the failure of existing models of digital literacy to fully and adequately describe what it is that we’re trying to do, a different model is called for. In broad brushstrokes, the difficulty (as we found in the previous chapter) is that most models of digital literacy don’t consider literacies in their plurality.
It is because most models are straight-jacketed by considering only a single ‘digital literacy’ that they can be accused of being either too prescriptive or overly vague. If a definition or model is too detailed then it begs the question around who’s doing the prescribing. What privileges their perspective?
On the other hand, if definitions or models don’t provide enough detail, then it’s extremely difficult to put them to work. They remain an academic and intellectual curiosity; something to be marvelled at and discussed, perhaps, but of little value in the classroom.
It’s with this in mind that I have come up with what I consider to be the eight essential elements of digital literacies. These haven’t been plucked out of thin air; these are based on my research over the past seven years and constitute a synthesis (as much as is possible) of leading thinkers in the field.
Where I think the eight essential elements approach differs from existing frameworks and models, however, is in the way they should be used. The elements are like ingredients — and you need to come up with the recipe. Just as anyone wishing to bake bread is going to need flour, water, yeast and heat, so to develop digital literacies you’re going to need to develop skills, attitudes and aptitudes in the eight areas I outline below:
- Cultural
- Cognitive
- Constructive
- Communicative
- Confident
- Creative
- Critical
- Civic
In some contexts, some of these elements may need to be privileged above others. I’m yet to come across a context, however, that didn’t require each of these elements to some extent.
I want to spend the rest of this chapter explaining and teasing out what lies behind each of these elements. It would, of course, be disingenuous to claim that the ‘definition’ of each of these is anything other than provisional. Just as there should be conversations about which are the most important elements in any given context, so too there should be discussions around what it means to be ‘Creative’, ‘Communicative’ and so on in that context.