E-learning week 5

• What is meant by digital literacies?

Digital literacy is the ability to read and understand information presented in digital form. It may be a website, a shared document, video, audio file or image library. People need to use the same skills that they would have traditionally to demonstrate literacy, (e.g. spelling, comprehension and sentence structure), but with digital media there are often multiple text types included.
I found this reference to Lessig's idea of remix which helped to explain why this sits at the high end for complexity in the digital literacy matrix
http://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1-literacies-on-a-human-scale/lankshear-and-knobel-remix-lessig/

• What opportunities and challenges do digital literacies present for educators?

I am particularly interested to learn from other teachers whether digital and information literacy are taught as stand alone subjects in their schools or if the skills are taught through the normal curriculum areas - embedded? We currently have students undertaking two separate courses one focused on the information literacy side taught by teacher librarians and the other on the digital skills side where students are given direct instruction on useful skills in the essential programmes.

• How important are the various new literacies?

I saw Jason Ohler give an amazing presentation on the new literacies at a conference I attended last year. He has conducted some very interesting research in this area and in particular the power of storytelling and art being critical elements in the discussion.