Search

New technologies and developments in media are transforming the way that individuals, groups and societies communicate, learn, work and govern. This new socio-technical reality requires participants to possess not only skills and abilities related to the use of technological tools, but also knowledge regarding the norms and practices of appropriate usage. To be ‘digitally literate’ in this way encompasses issues of cognitive authority, safety and privacy, creative, ethical, and responsible use and reuse of digital media, among other topics. A lack of digital literacy increasingly implicates one's full potential of being a competent student, an empowered employee or an engaged citizen. Digital literacy is often considered a school-based competency, but it is introduced and developed in informal learning contexts such as libraries, museums, social groups, affinity spaces online, not to mention the home environment. This article recognizes and connects the ways and places we might conceptualize and realize an expanded view of digital literacy that fits today's changing reality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Digital literacies have fast become indispensable for productive engagement, competency, and citizenship in a rapidly changing world. After-school programs represent an important venue where many young people can develop a mastery of digital literacies, encompassing both the creative and responsible use of a broad range of new media. This paper discusses relational habitus (the configuration of self, tools, tasks, and others in a specific activity) in the development of digital literacies among youth in a network of after-school programs called University-Community Links (UC Links). A collaborative effort among university and local community partners throughout California, UC Links provides informal learning activities that enable underserved K-12 youth to develop their digital literacies. After presenting UC Links' approach to informal learning after school, we offer a cognitive ethnography, describing how a distinctive relational habitus configures the links among self, tools, tasks, and others in informal digital activities at one UC Links site in Sacramento, CA. We suggest how this relational habitus informs collaborative activities among university and K-12 students to provide a cognitive platform for an agentive engagement with various new media tools. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explored informal (after-school) and formal (elective course in-school) learning contexts as contributors to middle-school student attitudinal changes in a guided discovery-based and blended e-learning program in which students designed web games and used social media and information resources for a full school year. Formality of the program context did not substantially influence attitude changes but did appear to influence learning outcomes. While intrinsic motivation did not change in the aggregate from pre- to post-program among students, positive changes in intrinsic motivation were found to be associated with engagement in almost all areas of student engagement inGlobaloria, with several at-home engagement changes measured. This finding challenges critiques of discovery-based learning as being de-motivating. Lower parent education among students was associated with positive changes in self-efficacy for online research indicating that disadvantaged students may stand to benefit from programs like this one. The study offers support for the need to more definitively explicate instructional design and context factors in educational technology research when investigating influences upon learning outcomes. The study holds implications for designing effective digital literacy interventions, and contributes to theory in the learning sciences and socio-technical systems research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Understanding the connections between scientific inquiry and digital literacy in informal learning environments is essential to furthering students' critical thinking and technology skills. The Habitat Tracker project combines a standards-based curriculum focused on the nature of science with an integrated system of online and mobile computing technologies designed to help students learn about and participate in scientific inquiry in formal classroom settings and informal learning environments such as science museums or wildlife centers. This research documents the digital literacy skills elementary students used while participating in the Habitat Tracker project, exploring the connections between the scientific inquiry practices they developed and the digital literacy skills they employed as they engaged with the Habitat Tracker curriculum. The results of this research have implications for researchers and practitioners interested in fostering both the scientific inquiry practices and digital literacy skills of elementary students in formal and informal learning environments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]