Digital Literacies for Learning

Citation

Ramalha Correia, A.M. (2007), "Digital Literacies for Learning", Online Information Review, Vol. 31 No. 4, pp. 543-544. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520710780520

One might define literacy as the ability to understand and express oneself in the symbology of the cultural group with which one wishes to communicate. Knowledge may be defined as the mental state that enables us, as individuals, to make sense of and operate successfully in the world about us. These definitions open this review because the contributors to Digital Literacies for Learning were unable to standardise their terminology. This has led to confusion of the terms “literacy”, “competence” and “skills” throughout the collection – they appear to be used synonymously by the authors. Indeed, some authors apologise for the confusion, but this does not bode well for either the quality of content or our ability to understand it.

In our daily lives we move into and out of various cultural groups and employ various literacies to communicate: auricular literacy, visual literacy, tactile literacy, olfactory literacy, gustatory literacy. As humans, we make little use of the last two but the other three translate the symbology of the cultural group into languages and thus literacies:

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  spoken language;

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  written language (including the tactile language of Braille); and

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  signed language.

So, each sense gives rise to a language; literacies are inextricably aligned with language, and it should be noted that the term “visual literacy” is much more appropriate to sign language than to multimedia skills.

What of digital literacy? Does this mean literacy in the language of computers (1s and 0s, as translated into the higher programming languages) or in the language of the ICT cultural group? If it is the latter, then digital literacy conforms to the definition given above. Information literacy conforms in the same way – being literate in the language of the information management cultural group. All this is to say that there is no need to generate confusion by the proliferation of pseudo‐literacies, which are no more than skill sets.

Knowledge is described variously in the book as information, knowledge/ information and even as a commodity! It is none of these things – see the definition above. Knowledge is in our heads; externalised knowledge, coded into language, is information; decoded information becomes knowledge, when it is understood and accepted. It is all about knowledge transfer, where information is the transfer medium. So there is no need for confusion, and using terms like “knowledge management” does not help. How do you manage something which resides in an individual's head? “Knowledge transfer management” has meaning in this context; it should be used to avoid any further confusion.

Literacy, then, is the ability to use the coding/decoding systems (languages) required for knowledge transfer. This statement is as true for insects and animals as it is for humans; the important difference lies in our ability to store and retrieve information.

This compilation is ambitious in its scope but restricted in its choice of authors. A better balance would have been achieved if contributors from the ICT world had been invited. This would have revealed the language inconsistencies at the boundary of the two cultural groups. The book is written for a closed group of educators and information specialists. It is not recommended for a wider readership and will only be useful for students when mediated by lecturers, to explain the confusion in terminology.