do digital literacies have politics?
TRANSCRIPT
Do digital literacies have politics?
Andrew WhitworthUniversity of Manchester
All images in this presentation are © A. Whitworth 2015 unless stated otherwise.
In the 1980s Langdon Winner asked:“Do Artefacts Have Politics?”….
Consider the differentpolitical consequencesof nuclear v renewableenergy, for example
… and answered(emphatically) YES…
I want to suggest that ‘digital literacy’has constantly been pulled towardsdefinitions that meet the needs of dominant interests in society
In terms used by Mikhail Bakhtin,centripetal force has long been exerted on digital literacy…
…as opposed to centrifugal force, which pushesto the margins….
…and thus promotes a view of digital literacy asempowerment.
’Twas not ever thus, though…
Photo of Dartmouth College by Gavin Huang, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_College#/media/File:BakerLibrary.jpg
John Nevison’s descriptionof digital literacy at DartmouthCollege in the first half ofthe 1970s is rather eye-opening…
More than 80% of all students(90%+ of freshmen), and half the faculty, were not just using, but programming ICT in their own particular contexts
Nevison wrote:
(Full reference: Nevison, J. (1976). Computing in the liberal arts college. Science 194: 396–402.)
The growth of computing among the students and faculty at Dartmouth has been organic. It has proceeded at an unhurried pace where students and faculty learn to program largely on their own.
A new instructor at Dartmouth will find computing all around…
The Dartmouth initiative doubtless benefited from its being the home of BASIC, the programminglanguage that eventually found its way onto 1980s home computers like the Sinclair ZX Spectrum andBBC Micro.
But this is the point… Through interaction with a supportivelearning environment, that was embedded in the infrastructureand culture of this institution — very high digital literacy rateswere achieved…
… and in an emergent way (Egan 1990), with individualsand teams finding their own appropriate use for ICT in differing contexts.
Also in 1976… Cees Hamelink publishes ‘AnAlternative to News’ (Journal of Communication 20, 120–123.)
Hamelink’s view of literacy is specificallyFreirean… encouraging oppressedpopulations to realise literacy in their own contexts — understandingthe value of their own perspectives
The broadcast media push theviews, interpretations and languageof the powerful onto their audience…
This is a view of literacy as somethingthat distributes authority over informational and digital practices.
Combine it with the ‘Dartmouth model’ and we can construct a ‘digital makers’ discourse….
supported, educationally, by technologies such as the Raspberry Pi and Arduino….
• Nesta — “Make Things Do Stuff” (2013)
Make Things Do Stuff aims to mobilize the next generation of digital makers. We want to help people to make the shift from consuming digital technologies, to making and building their own. Because when all kinds of different people start hacking, re-mixing and making things with technology, the possibilities get really interesting. Make Things Do Stuff will enable people to … navigate a path that will take them from being a digital consumer, to being a digital maker. (Make Things Do Stuff 2013a)
Then there’s increasingly accessible media production, mobiletelephony, wi-fi etc etc….
We are all finding ways to integrate these technologies into professional and everyday lives.
BUT…
The UK, 2012… The Royal Society publish ‘Shutdown and Restart’,a report which defines digital literacy as fundamental to the application of computing in science, industry and everyday life.
Yet it did so in a way that allowed theDoE to almost completely remove itfrom the school curriculum, in favourof ‘computational thinking’
The report is at https://royalsociety.org/education/policy/computing-in-schools/report/
The assumption seems to be that these basic skills are being ‘naturally’ picked upby young people.
Banks’s research (2015) into the teaching of computing in schools suggests that computational thinking does indeedstimulate certain learners, who may well go on to furtherwork in computing…
But differently inclined learners are notengaged by it.
And thanks to Gove’s policy change in 2012, emergentand critical digital literacies are no longer being addressedin UK schools.
Banks writes:Computer science students have a particular responsibility to develop criticality, given that they are learning to develop the technologies of the future and this gives them potential for considerable power that they are often unaware of.
CS students generally have a technical background and are “used to sitting and listening... learning the correct way to do things” (Bullen, 1998). But if the students’ underlying epistemology is based on a deterministic “correct way”, this is problematic for critical thinking: for example Chan, Ho, and Ku’s (2011) research suggests that students who view knowledge as certain have a reduced capacity for critical thinking.
This generation of learners will be entering the UK universitysystem over the next few years…
This is centripetal force in action…
A particular perspective, pushedby a very small group then filtered still further by a singleindividual…
…yet nevertheless now backedby administrative and legal force.
The ‘digital maker’ discourse is a significant, and encouragingone…
…and more critical, radical workdoes still take place.
See the work of Virginia Eubanksfor example (Digital Dead End).
But we need to learn to see it… then support it.
THANK YOU…
@DrewWhitworth1
http://www.MAdigitaltechnologies.com