4.2 - 1) Practice Digital Literacies

Welcome back. It's Week 4, Lesson 2 of "The History and Future of Higher Education".

Today, we're going to start our progression to the 10 + 1 ways to shift the paradigm of higher education. We're going to start with what I think is probably the most basic way to shift the paradigm of higher education today. And that's by 1) Practicing digital literacies. By that, I mean all of the new affordances of the technology of our era, which pose so many public; personal; private; policy; psychological; emotional; cognitive kinds of issues for us. And, astonishingly, although as we've said so many times-- "Life changed dramatically on April 22, 1993", when the internet was commercialized, and we all, for the first time in human history, had this amazing new ability to have an idea, and communicate that idea to anybody else with an internet connection-- we have not really transformed education to take into account how dramatically our responsibilities; possibilities; and challenges are in this digital age.

Here are some of the digital literacies that I think should be taught actually from kindergarten to law school, medical school, graduate school,
professional school:
1) Attention: We all know that we have many conflicting ways, and new ways, and parallel ways of paying attention in the era we live in. We might call it multitasking, we might call it texting while driving, but we have many things compelling our attention. What are the best practices for paying attention in the digital age?

2) Participation: We love to talk about access and how we all have access to the Internet. Is that true? Does everybody have access to the
Internet? Are there some people who have access to the internet, but who don't participate? In this class, we've really emphasized that it's not
just about learning passively, but about participating and contributing.

Here's something interesting. We talk about Wikipedia being the biggest encyclopedia the world has ever known. Only 14 percent of the contributors to Wikipedia are women. That's shocking. The knowledge purveyors, the knowledge preservers of the world tend to be female: librarians, teachers, even readers tend to be female-- disproportionately female-- but only 14 percent of the contributors to Wikipedia are female. Why is that? What is it that prevents women from feeling they have access to the media? This is also true about minorities, people who do not feel that they have full participation in society; we like to think it's naive time in 1993 that everybody was equal on the internet. There's a very famous cartoon that appeared in the New Yorker by Steiner, that says, "On the internet, no one knows you're a dog, and it's two dogs talking to each other and sending messages on the internet." And the point of that is, on the internet, you can be anybody. And the naive belief in 1993 was, because you could be anybody on the internet, it would allow equal participation of women; people of color; people who feel that, because of gender, they're not equal; LGBT people. All kinds of people would feel very comfortable interacting on the internet. We found out that is not true; the disparities in society get mirrored on the internet, with some exceptions that we'll be talking about later on in the course.

3) Privacy is another key issue of digital literacy. Who is reading our emails? It's not just parents or our friends; it's not just people on Facebook or Twitter. We now know that the government has access to our email. What does that mean? What does that teach us about how we should respond? What are our responsibilities as people using the internet?

4) Security is another one. There's really no way to prevent governments from spying, but you can prevent some of the worst commercial abuses of your data simply by keeping your software updated. So-- helpful rule of this course: always update your software when you're told by your software manufacturer to update it. Be aware of phishing-- we will have information on the website about phishing and other kinds of scams, as well. So, at the same time, you have to protect yourself; you have to be smart about how you are protecting yourself so you don't make yourself, in fact, vulnerable to people who know you are afraid.

5) Sustainability is another digital literacy. When we make something online, who preserves it? How is it preserved? Some things seems to last forever. Other things disappear. Those are issues we think about whenever we're engaging in online activity.

6) Credibility: If I go to a source, I don't know if that's a valid source or not. What skills do I need to possess in order to ascertain whether the source I'm referring to is, in fact, credible or not?

7) Ethics: What are the ethical implications of participation and contribution on the internet? We are not data. We're human beings. We're complex human beings. We have complex ways that we interact in society and online. What are the ethics of our behaviors?

The point of digital literacy is that we live in a complex new world, and we have to learn how to behave as good; moral; engaged; responsible
citizens of this world. I like to say that we've, for 150 years, talked about three Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic. That's what education was about and was founded on for 150 years. Now we need a fourth R. I don't know what that fourth R is "algorithm"? Reading, writing, arithmetic, and algorithm? That's a little awkward, but the basic point is we need to make digital literacy as much as part of our education, and the future of education as reading, writing, and arithmetic. It's complicated, it's important, let's do it.