Digital Literacy and Meaning-Making

According to Bloom’s Taxonomy the highest level of learning takes place in the creation stage. In the past, people have trouble finding opportunity in get to this level, especially students. Digital literacy has allowed not only for a freedom of creativity but also a space for collaboration as well as criticality more than ever (Gillen & Barton, 2010, p. 19). “Each learner is an amalgam of diverse experiences, capabilities, and understandings affected by the entirety of their personal history including experiences of physical strengths and weaknesses” (Gillen & Barton, 2010, p. 17). It would seem that trying to harness an individual into fitting a single mold of person would encourage resistance from said individual. Reading digital media makes reading into an activity which allows the reader to change the text they are reading as it is being read (Gillen & Barton, 2010, p. 7).

Just because digital literacy has differences from traditional literacy, the two should not be seen as independent from each other. Learners still must be aware of operational, cultural, and critical dimensions involved with the technological world just as they had to in print (Literacy, 2014). Operationally speaking they must know how to make the technology work by knowing how to turn products on, what cables go where, how to troubleshoot, etc. (Literacy, 2014). That aspect is often the biggest barrier for an older generation to break through. There is a practice of meaning and authenticity that lends to a cultural dimension within digital literacy (Literacy, 2014). Then there is an aspect of critiquing others work “to read and use them against the grain, to appropriate and even redesign them” (Literacy, 2014). “The uses of educational technology have a two-fold advantage: they can promote the types of literacy traditionally encouraged in learning, as well as the digital fluency needed to prosper in the digital age” (Huffaker, 2005, p. 93)

For the purposes of living, today’s youth must have digital literacy. Although, the shift in literacy calls for wholesale educational changes which most teachers are hesitant of seeing as the “technologies themselves let alone the practices around them are seemingly in a constant state of flux” (Gillen & Barton, 2010, p. 10). These multimodal forms of literacy are a feature of daily life and teachers, most often, know less about them than their students (Literacy, 2014). The idea of going outside of what a teacher themselves learned is a scary concept but it has become necessary for future success of current students. Online content creation is only limited by the creativity of its users (Huffaker, 2005, p. 96). It is creativity though, that brings about the most learning.