Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

 ‘Visitors and Residents’ is a continuum of modes of engagement which has been well established as a valuable way to understand how individuals engage online. This paper discusses how the original metaphor of Visitors and Residents has been developed into a mapping process which helps individuals to visualise, and reflect on, the digital tools and1 places they use or spend time in. The paper explores ways that the Visitors and Resident work has developed and proposes a method of analysing a body of maps through ‘engagement genres’ to discover broader trends in behaviour across groups.

Contents

1. Introduction
2. Mapping ways of engaging with the Web in different contexts
3. Piloting the mapping process: A form of qualitative research
4. Discussion and conclusions

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.