Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

Before I worked at Tinder Foundation, I was a digital skills tutor at a UK online centre in Sheffield. When you spend most of your working week teaching people how to use the internet, you start to notice patterns: the same concerns, the same doubts, often expressed in the same words by different people.

At the end of their first lesson, a lot of new users would remark that ‘I still don’t have a clue what I’m doing’, or that they would ‘have forgotten it all by next week’. They weren’t sceptical about the internet per se; what they didn’t have faith in was their own ability to learn. For them, learning to use digital technology was somehow different from learning other skills. On top of that, many had negative experiences of formal education, from which they’d come to feel that they simply weren’t any good at learning.