How--and to what degree--will digital technologies change the nature of learning, and the idea of what constitutes literacy? What is "digital literacy"?

"New Literacy," or Digital Literacy, is the term the participants in the Vision 2010 seminars used to characterize the new knowledge and skills, the new orientation of scholarship, resulting from the abilities of digital information technologies and their application to scholarly communication. Participants agreed that the application of these technologies may change profoundly the ways in which learning and teaching take place. One participant captured this idea as a new "sociology of learning"; another described it as the shift from the textual codex book signal as the primary medium of scholarly communication to a multimedia digital signal. Examples of this digital signal, in the form of multimedia educational tools, already abound.

At this point, you can move to a synopsis of the history of these ideas as they developed through the Vision 2010 seminars and the meetings with university presidents and provosts. Or you can move directly to the ongoing online discussion of these ideas, where we hope you will add your own thoughts.

A History of the Vision 2010 Discussion of Digital Literacy

In his seminal article "A New Operating System for the Humanities," Richard Lanham asks, "What happens when . . . humanistic knowledge moves from book to screen?" The most general statement of his answer: "The operating system changes fundamentally." This answer is broad enough to serve as a starting point for a discussion of the effects of digital revolution on not only the humanities, but also most other fields of scholarly communication. Some of the potential changes that were discussed in the Vision 2010 seminars and meetings include the following:

• A shift away from a primary--often exclusive--focus on text as the conduit for information and analysis. Information technologies offer easy access to a richer, multimedia signal that integrates text with sound, graphics, and video, and that can be interactive. "I think that a lot of this discussion has really centered around the technology not only automating the current practice but also profoundly changing the nature of knowledge discovery and dissemination. . . . That's not speculation or a prediction but can be demonstrated with an increasing number of examples."
  ----- from the Vision 2010 seminar in New Orleans

• A multimedia presentation offers students alternate modes of learning, allowing them more latitude to rely on their strongest cognitive domain, be that textual, aural, or visual. "I'm talking about elitism of people who learn in a certain way intellectually. I'm basically arguing that the new form allows for multiple ways of learning, which are not text-based, which are not symbolic, logic-based, and it's a different kind of reasoning process that can take place today that was not possible before."
  ----- from the Vision 2010 seminar in New Orleans

• The explosion of computer networks, mail lists, news groups, and online collaborations may make virtual communities as important as--if not more important than--real-life communities. "What I think everyone is saying is the digital-visual wall is going to create new forms of community, new forms of learning--brickless, mortarless, the ability to engage in new kinds of exchange. So I think of that as the sociology of learning. And that's an evolutionary process. It's not either/or; it's an effect of how much and in what proportions higher education is going to be where."
  ----- from the Vision 2010 seminar in New Orleans

• An ongoing digital revolution and a burgeoning "knowledge society" may make both more divisive and more decisive the gap between the "knows" and "know-nots," between those who have integrated technology into their learning and those who have not. These two sides may be represented, respectively, by students and professors. "Increasingly computer-literate students become disaffected with nondigital professors and institutions. These students may be a source of change."
  ----- from the Vision 2010 seminar in Chicago

• Students will have to be skilled not only in taking in knowledge through new media, but also in creating knowledge through those media. One aspect of this may be an increased emphasis on visual and artistic skills. "Let us not be so isolated to our current cultural condition to think that pictures and visual representations are things you look at that someone else makes. You need, in fact, if it's going to be a formal language, to be able to have the ability to create them as well as understand them. And the skills set to be able to do that is usually quite orthogonal to the skills set of people who have had formal education in this country. . . . It is indeed another form of reasoning."
  ----- from the Vision 2010 seminar in New Orleans

• An emphasis on new modes of teaching, learning, and research could make universities increasingly marginal as other players move in to provide services in these expanding areas. "If in fact it is the case that the broadening of modes of learning, doing, expressing, storing . . . are going to expand, and that we as institutions participate, therefore, in a steadily smaller percent of that, then we become increasingly less relevant to what the world is doing."
  ----- from the Vision 2010 seminar in New Orleans

• An increased emphasis on interactive, multimedia educational tools may make learning more of an active process--the comingling of learning and doing--which in turn may make the professor's role more one of mentor or coach than of disseminator of knowledge.

• Likewise, this emphasis may shift the scholarly emphasis away from traditional analysis and more toward the process of synthesis or some variety of artistic creation that would reward a different species of reasoning process. "There is even some sense in many parts of the institution that the nature of the creation of knowledge is shifting away from analysis which has characterized most of the twentieth century to more of a creation of the process itself . . . in a sense, rather than examining what is, trying to create what has never been, drawing more upon the experience of the artist, perhaps, than on the analytical skills of the scientist."
  ----- from the Vision 2010 meeting with AAU Presidents

• The digital revolution may allow students more customized and individualized learning environments. "One of the big revolutions here is . . . the form itself frees people from only one way of accessing knowledge. It allows people many more degrees of freedom and choice."
  ----- from the Vision 2010 seminar in New Orleans

• By forcing students to live in multiple virtual communities, digital literacy may make collaboration technology a necessary skill.

• A digital learning environment could support "learning play" (and the element of play has always haunted the world of computers) in innovative ways and could have a profound impact on the educational success of underrepresented sectors, partly by exposing kids to knowledge acquisition in more neutral or private and nonthreatening settings, and partly by allowing the choice of multiple modes of learning.
  ----- from the Vision 2010 seminar in Chicago

These were some of the thoughts the question of "digital literacy" provoked in the Vision 2010 seminars and meetings. Please share your thoughts on this topic in the ongoing online discussion of digital literacy.

Home || Scenarios || Discussion || Site Map || Table of Contents