Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

PwC Ireland’s chief digital officer, Joe Tynan, discusses the company’s new digital fitness assessment app and the importance of closing the digital knowledge gap.

Digital awareness has never been so important. More people than ever are now working from home and communicating online, and the current crisis has highlighted the dangers of misinformation, which has never been easier to access.

Becoming more digitally fit can help people at any technical level to improve their digital literacy and awareness in this challenging time.

With this in mind, PwC has released its own digital fitness app for free

The technological imperative is writ large across university campuses – helping to create spaces and places for our students to flourish, as we flip, blend and merge our pedagogies to engage the generation “Z “ students – the first ones to arrive in HE with internet access from an early age.

The big data affordances of learner analytics with algorithms to monitor, log, and prompt us to intervene has the potential to automate our progression worries and responses. The drivers for change are evident. The current polarisation of the UK “politick” is reflected in policy for higher education in the UK. The needs of employers are paramount, and education for “public good” has been swept away in pressures to have digital savvy and knowledgeable graduates.

Having good digital literacy skills just makes sense in a digital world. The messages we create and consume, along with the information we generate and absorb daily, all require digital literacy skills to some degree. So if you’re new to them, this infographic from Time to Know called Essential Digital Literacy Skills for the 21st Century Worker is a good start.

It was featured on E-Learning Infographics in a post that cites the work of Professor Yoram Eshet, a leader in digital literacy research from the Open University of Israel. 

The effort to ensure that students are “future ready” has gained momentum in recent years as more and more stakeholders have recognized the importance of digital learning tools to ensuring the success of students. And while the effort has largely focused on elementary and secondary education, that does not mean that college students are off the hook. Rather, the same principles that benefit younger students will help college students make the most of their higher education experience. In fact, since one of the main aspects of the future ready movement is ensuring that students are prepared for college and work, the need for college students to have these skills developed is all the more acute.

Digital capabilities are integral to personal, academic and professional development. This resource aims to support students and staff in developing these capabilities. In the broadest sense, digital capabilities may be defined as those skills, knowledge and practices that enable an individual to understand and interact with the digital world effectively and safely. Digital capabilities mediate how well a person is able to utilise digital tools and services aimed at supporting learning and, for many professions, they will impact on subsequent employability. Teaching staff need to meet expectations around delivering digitally and supporting the necessary digital capabilities required by a twenty-first century graduate.

There is a belief that younger people are fully engaged with the digital world. But I am currently leading a project exploring people’s knowledge and use of online data, and the preliminary findings from our research has found that data literacy is not uniformly high among younger people, as is often assumed. Instead, some young people have very low levels of data literacy.

Digital Competence Framework for Educators (DigCompEdu)

The teaching professions face rapidly changing demands, which require a new, broader and more sophisticated set of competences than before. The ubiquity of digital devices and applications, in particular, requires educators to develop their digital competence.

The European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators (DigCompEdu) is a scientifically sound framework describing what it means for educators to be digitally competent. It provides a general reference frame to support the development of educator-specific digital competences in Europe. DigCompEdu is directed towards educators at all levels of education, from early childhood to higher and adult education, including general and vocational education and training, special needs education, and non-formal learning contexts.

In this series we explore Powerful Learning, a set of principles to guide educators designing learning experiences that engage the hearts and minds of learners and incorporate technology in ways that contribute to closing the Digital Learning Gap. In this second post, we explore how Powerful Learning is authentic and challenging, share research that grounds these two principles, and provide resources to support your own learning and teaching practices.

This special briefing explores personl learning as the future of learning, explores why it's important, the tools which enable personal learning and the significant potential of personal learning as a key to life-long learning and the skills agenda.

This section looks at the various aspects and principles relating to digital literacy and the many skills and competencies that fall under the digital literacy umbrella. The relationship between digital literacy and digital citizenship is also explored and tips are provided for teaching these skills in the classroom.