Digital Literacy in my Work

I am not sure that I support the premise that these are 8 “essential” skills required to be a successful student in higher education in the digital age.  For a start, the source article was considering the skills that students of digital marketing .  To extrapolate that the same skills are “essential” for all students in higher education strikes me more as cheer leading than academically sound thought.

I can fully understand how a passion for digital literacy may be essential for a student who is studying digital marketing.  In the same way that a passion for cars might help if you want to work in Formula 1.  But I am less certain that the same passion is required for all disciplines.  I also didn’t really buy what was written about accountability and the bigger picture.  Mainly because I couldn’t find that it actually said anything.  At all.

I did find the video of Howard Rheingold interesting.  He talks about the importance of literacy which is the ability to communicate with others.   I think some of the factors  he lists (such as collaboration) are true in whatever forum we are working in, but the skill set required is different.  In the project my students were completing I would say the focus was on developing their technological participation, communication and collaboration skills.

I think the higher level skills such as critical consumption (Rheingold’s phrase) is unrealistic for Year 1 students learning in a second language.  And this leads me on to how to go about preventing plagiarism and “proper academic practise” (I hate that phrase).

The whole point about plagiarism is that in universities years ago it was absolutely vital to cite your sources for 2 separate reasons.  Firstly in scientific research, it would be very important to be able to verify where your data came from so that facts could be checked and theories tested (think of the MMR vaccine trials in the UK which were subsequently found to be based on tainted research).  In other disciplines citing was important so that you could demonstrate the ideas as being your own.

Today,  most teachers I come into contact with are concerned about 2 separate types of plagiarism.  Firstly, straightforward copying from the internet. But with tools like safe assign and turn it in available, that should be more difficult.  Additionally, if a student can complete any project using Wikipedia as a main referencing source, the teacher is doing something wrong.  In the economics project my students completed they were required to meet with a local business manager and apply basic economic principles to that business.  Obviously they could obtain information about the Law of Demand from the internet but they could not obtain information about that businesses cost curves without speaking to the business manager.

 The second most common form of plagiarism is where a student relies on another student to completed  the project but gets the grades for it.  Again, where this happens it is the fault of whoever constructed the assessment tool.  If 1 person could complete a project set for 4 people, then why set it for 4?  Unless you are grading them for collaboration.  But that is not usually one of the Learning Outcomes.  How we handled this in economics was that 30% of the grade came from the project.  But only 10% came from the final written report.  The other 20% came from the student’s own individual performance in an oral Q&A session based on drafts of the project.  This proved to be an excellent way of identifying the students that had worked on the project and understood it and the students who had taken a back seat.