Students around table

Digital Fluency

Author: Dr Tunde Varga-Atkins

Digitally fluent graduates think critically and make balanced judgements as they select and use digital platforms to connect, collaborate, and communicate in academic and professional contexts and as citizens. They are open to continuously developing digital practices and artefacts and they manage their digital identity in a professional and responsible manner allowing appropriate opportunities to practice and receive feedback on performance.

Benefits

Developing digital fluency helps students to:

  • Thrive in a subject area or profession in our digital society (Beetham, 2017b).
  • Reach and express informed views and engage fully in a digital society (CILIP, 2018).
  • Become socially and ethically critical of technology (Hudson, 2009).
  • Foster an agile mind-set, confidence and self-regulation (Becker et al., 2017).

Students’ digital aptitude does not necessarily transfer into subject-specific contexts (Kennedy et al., 2010). They need support in developing digital practices as learners and would-be professionals (Bartlett-Bragg, 2017).

Putting it into practice

To design for digital fluency, ask yourself:

  • What does digital fluency mean in my subject area?
  • What are the significant digital developments that have transformed or disrupted my discipline? How could we match these with our educational offering in learning outcomes, activities and assessment criteria?
  • How will students recognise that they are developing digital capabilities?

Effective ways to develop digital fluency could include:

  • Offering authentic learning tasks in digital contexts within a module or programme, rather than separately (Beetham, McGill, & Littlejohn, 2012).
  • Setting enquiry-based learning tasks, “sweet-spots” for developing digital fluency and information literacy (Bruce and Casey, 2012).
  • Getting students to work together on digital tasks, developing subject-specific knowledge as well as learning how to collaborate and communicate professionally (Sinclair, 2013).
  • Utilising students’ existing digital skills by enabling them to choose what digital tool to use.

Check JISC’s Digital Bloom’s taxonomy for ideas.

Consider setting tasks that require students to:

  • Critically evaluate a range of academic, professional and industry information sources, which might be in different media (text, image, video, animation, audio).
  • Present their findings in a range of digital formats, appropriate for a defined audience or purpose.
  • Use, store and share data/information digitally, applying ethical, legal & security requirements.
  • Individually or collaboratively, develop, problem-solve & share ideas & solutions using digital technologies.
  • Participate, follow and critique developments in your field in online professional networks and social media.
  • Critically reflect on their own digital capabilities and the implications of using/choosing between different technologies and resources.
  • Record their learning achievements in e-portfolios and maintain a positive, professional online identity.

Course-level progression

Course-level progression might look like:

  • Stepped progression: using -> evaluating -> creating digital technologies/resources.
  • Moving from private to public: working within the VLE’s walled-garden -> showcasing publicly online.
  • Gaining independence: working with tools/resources suggested by tutors -> getting students to locate, choose and critically evaluate digital tools/resources.

While some subjects require students to acquire specialised software skills, the focus should be on developing independent learners who are able to work out a new digital tool/resource via self-help tutorials, resources or peer support. This could happen by staff:

  • Modelling technology use in relevant, subject-specific contexts: students are influenced by tutors when adopting technology (Margaryan et al., 2011).
  • Modelling how you go about learning new digital skills; academics do not have be a tech-guru in everything.
  • Signposting students to self-help tutorials (Lynda.com, YouTube etc.), workshops (e.g. KnowHow) & involving experts in your teaching (e.g. librarians, careers).
  • Creating a culture for rewarding students who try new things, learn from their mistakes & seek help.
  • Designing tasks which involve students learning multimedia and technical skills from peers.

Challenges

Firstly, staff who might lack digital confidence might take solace in that it is their disciplinary expertise that they need to make the focus of their digital learning task. Secondly, both staff and students can overestimate students’ digital fluency (Sharpe, 2010; Coldwell-Neilson, 2017).

Incorporate ways for students to recognise, articulate and record developing digital capabilities:

  • Articulate the specific digital capability as a learning outcome/assessment criteria in the session/module.
  • Ask students to critically reflect on how they chose which digital technology or platform to use and its advantages/disadvantages; the capabilities they acquired in the process.
  • Focus on engagement with subject knowledge (e.g. ‘communicate X effectively using multimedia’) rather than on technology, and highlight good digital practices (e.g. explaining examples where multimedia is used effectively).

Not all students might have access, skills or confidence to use digital technologies. Find out your students’ digital practices and preferences to help ensure an inclusive learning environment. Students, and staff, when choosing a digital platform for group work, need to consider their peers’ access to and cultural preferences for certain platforms (e.g. WeChat/WhatsApp). 

References

Bartlett-Bragg, A. (2017, July 3). Digital capabilities: Where people and technology intersect. EDULEARN17, Barcelona, Spain. https://bit.ly/Digital-Capabilities-Where-people-and-technology-intersect

Becker, S. A., Pasquini, L. A., & Zentner, A. (2017). Digital literacy impact study: An NMC Horizon project strategic brief. The New Media Consortium.

Beetham, H. (2017, October 31). Designing for digital capabilities in the curriculum: What’s new? Jisc Building Digital Capability Blog. https://digitalcapability.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2017/10/31/designing-for-digital-capabilities-in-the-curriculum-whats-new/

Beetham, H., McGill, L., & Littlejohn, A. (2009). Thriving in the 21st century: Learning Literacies for the Digital Age (LLiDA project). http://oro.open.ac.uk/52237/

Bruce, B. C., & Casey, L. (2012). The Practice of Inquiry: A Pedagogical ‘Sweet Spot’ for Digital Literacy? Computers in the Schools, 29(1–2), 191–206. https://doi.org/10.1080/07380569.2012.657994

Coldwell-Neilson, J. (2017, June 27). Digital Literacy–a driver for curriculum transformation. HERDSA, Sydney, Australia.

Hudson, A. (2009). New professionals and new technologies in new higher education? : Conceptualising struggles in the field [Umea University]. http://umu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:236168

Kennedy, G., Judd, T., Dalgarno, B., & Waycott, J. (2010). Beyond natives and immigrants: Exploring types of net generation students: Types of net generation students. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 26(5), 332–343. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2729.2010.00371.x

Littlejohn, A., Beetham, H., & McGill, L. (2012). Learning at the digital frontier: A review of digital literacies in theory and practice: Learning at the digital frontier. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 28(6), 547–556. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2729.2011.00474.x

Margaryan, A., Littlejohn, A., & Vojt, G. (2011). Are digital natives a myth or reality? University students’ use of digital technologies. Computers & Education, 56(2), 429–440. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2010.09.004

Sharpe, R., & Beetham, H. (2010). Chapter 6: Understanding students’ uses of technology for learning: Towards creative appropriation. In R. Sharpe, H. Beetham, & S. de Freitas (Eds.), Rethinking learning for a digital age: How learners are shaping their own experiences (pp. 85–99). Routledge.

Sinclair, S. (2013). Digital literacy in religious studies. Diskus: The Journal of the British Association for the Study of Religions (BASR), 14, 37–54.

Reading list

Graduate attribute: Digital fluency
 

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Digital Fluency by Dr Tunde Varga-Atkins is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.