Changes in how we communicate alter the structure of society....

1. Mapping Digital Literacies
Matthew Sowerby
Senior Lecturer in Photography, Art & Design
Edinburgh College

2. • Literacies for Learning in Further Education
(LfLFE) project
• Collaboration between the Universities of
Stirling and Lancaster
• Findings published in 2009
• With thanks to Dr Greg Mannion

3. • Changes in how we communicate alter the
structure of society
The medium is the message

4. Marshall McLuhan
• The Medium is the Message 1967

5. • The alphabet

7. • The alphabet introduced literacy
• We no longer had to be in the physical
presence of someone to learn what they had
to say

10. The medium is the message
And now… a networked world
Facebook traffic in a 24 hour period

11. • Approximately 250 million photos per day are
uploaded to Facebook.
• 7.5 billion photos a month.
• 10.4 million photos an hour.
• 174,000 photos per minute.
• 3,000 photos per second.

12. 9 year old Martha Payne’s £2 School dinner

15. Martha Payne and her blog: neverseconds.blogspot.co.uk

18. Douglas Adams
• “Everything that exists in the world when you
are born is normal.”

19. Douglas Adams
• “Everything that comes along before you turn
thirty is interesting and something you might
be able to use in your life and career.”

20. Douglas Adams
• “Everything that comes along after you reach
thirty is the end of civilisation as we know it…

21. Douglas Adams
• “Everything that comes along after you reach
thirty is the end of civilisation as we know it…
until its been around for a decade, when it
turns out to be quite good after all.”

22. www.MarcPrensky.com
• Digital Natives Digital Immigrants
• Access to technology is causing young
people’s brains to wire-up differently

23. Changing literacies
• We (digital immigrants) grew up with the
transmission of information from the fixed
authority of the author of the printed word
• Now students (digital natives) expect to be
able to communicate, share, collaborate with
new image-led hybrid-texts
- that for them is normal

24. Hybrid-texts

25. (Out-dated) models of Education
• The traditional classroom emerged to
efficiently inculcate a skilled workforce to
meet the needs of industry (Dewey c.1900)

26. Traditional literacies
• Three Rs
• Reading
• Writing
• Arithmetic

27. Closed book tests
• How much can you memorise in order to pass
a test...
… in circumstances that bear little relation to
anything you do in the rest of your life?

28. Closed book tests
• Don’t look it up
• Don’t collaborate
• Don’t look at your own notes
• “That’s cheating”

29. Modern literacies
• Knowing where to look, or find out where to
look for information
• Interpersonal skills to collaborate with others
• Using material gathered from research or
previous experience
• “Not cheating”

30. • We are driving a sports car into the future
while looking only in the rear view mirror

31. Mapping exercise
• Three domains:
Home
Work Learning

32. Mapping exercise
• Place the icons in the domain where you use
that literacy skill

33. Mapping exercise
• When you’ve finished, take a moment to look
at what literacy skills you use – and where you
use them.
• Which skills are central to your home, work
and learning life?

34. Mapping exercise
• Then take a moment to look at the literacy
skills you don’t use.
• Any surprises?

35. The message of digital literacy
• Enabling us to reconvene in tribal groups
• Learning from others at a pace that suits us
• Collaboration
• Discussion

36. • “We now live in a global village… a simultaneous
happening. We have begun again to structure the
tribal emotions from which a few centuries of
literacy divorced us.” Marshall McLuhan

37. Revolutions
• The Industrial revolution
• The Digital revolution
• We must not allow the potential offered by
this digital revolution to be hijacked by
entertainment, distraction and trivia

38. Lights and wires in a box
• EDWARD R. MURROW
A speech at convention for American TV
broadcasters
Chicago, October 15th 1958

39. Lights and wires in a box
EDWARD R. MURROW
• A speech at convention for American TV
broadcasters Chicago, October 15th 1958
•“This instrument can teach, it can illuminate and it can
even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that
humans are determined to use it to those ends.
Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box.”

40. “Bad weather coming, stay at home”

41. In the spirit of Douglas Adams…
• Unless we embrace what students find
‘normal’ – organised Education as we
know it may be undermined by the
natural instinct to learn
matthew.sowerby@edinburghcollege.ac.uk