The essential elements of digital literacies: Doug Belshaw at TEDxWarwick

[Music] I don't know how many of you might see a two or three-year-old child use a computer mouse for the first time they don't get at a horizontal movement of the mouse corresponds to a vertical movement of the cursor of the screen so they try and pick the mouse up to move the cursor up the screen because the translation between the interface and the screen it's just lost on them sometimes I don't think we understand that there's a lot of pre literal behaviors and gestures involved with things like books for example so I've got a

one-year-old daughter and sometimes she picks up books upside down and she was still a few months ago trying to open books from the spine and so I think we need to understand that this preliterate behaviors and Josh is involved with almost everything we do like using a traditional computer or trying to open a book I think the same is true of things like musical instruments as one with a musical instrument and it takes a long time for your gestures to get ingrained I'm learning to play the guitar at the moment and it does take a

lot of practice for your fingers to start doing what your brain wants them to do so this raises an interesting question for me what does it mean to be able to play the guitar and what does it mean to be literate being able to play the notes in kind of a plodding way is that the opposite end of the spectrum isn't it two people who are just awesome like Rodrigo and Gabriela there's a real spectrum involved there so I think there's a context and the difference between the two is the fact that it takes a

lot of definition to decide what it is that counts as things like being able to play the guitar or digital literacies so this is taken from UNESCO in 1950s and they talk about how it's really not possible to speak of illiterate and literate people as two different categories it all depends upon context so when you're playing the guitar there's formal situations and there's informal situations and there's lots of different contexts within which you can be literate as well so bearing all that in mind today I want to talk to you about my grandma blesser first

of all before I tell you a story about my grandma noticed that I pad in the background we're gonna come back to that later so my grandma she loves football she always has done and now that she's ATH has got a lot of chance to watch as many football matches as she wants so my dad recently arranged for her to get Sky Sports installed and there's a problem you can't just get Sky Sports you have to get all those other hundreds of channels as well so whereas previously she would have pressed channel up or channel

down to go to the right channel now she has to deal with a menu system i long ago realized I wasn't the best type of person for technical support so I've kind of outsourced that to my dad and he has to try and show her how to navigate to the right channel and this has taken weeks why is that and why a generation ago was at me who had to program the VCR well I think it's partly because menu systems rely on branching logic you choose one option and then you get some kind of sub

options as a result of that and if you don't want any of those options you have to backup well where does that exist in nature it seems to be a peculiar kind of thing it's the same kind of thing you get when you try and phone big companies and they try and loot your call through to the right Department they give you some choices of menus and submenus that you navigate using a numeric keypad and then they put you on hold for 15 minutes you get through to somebody and then you have to be transferred

anyway actually not all companies do this I had to return something to Apple recently and they don't do this they they put you through to some kind of disembodied voice that recognizes your your voice and your request and then it puts you straight through to the right Department I think that Apple understand that there's kind of a barrier to getting started in the digital world they try to lower somehow so I said come back to the iPad why is it so easy to use well I think partly it's because it's got a really simple menu

system everything that you want to do is represented by some kind of icon so you want to check your email you click on the email app icon you want to get out of that up you press the only physical button on there you want to buy a new app you go to the App Store it's really simple but if we're talking about literacy as being reading and writing then we're missing half the story here aren't we it's what Mitchell Baker who's chairperson and Mozilla calls elegant consumption and I think we need to move beyond elegant

consumption because we're better than that so really all that was just a prelude to what I really want to talk about today which is the work I've been to for the last six years of my doctoral thesis but I wanted to mention all that kind of procedural and behavioral stuff because what I'm going to talk about from here depends upon all of that so I want to talk about success Kid lolcat and casual pepper spray cop today they're all examples of memes and if you haven't seen a mean before it's an idea behavior or style

that spreads from person to person within a culture so let me tell you a story of a meme on the 26th of August 2007 flickr user elaine EG took this photo of a son sunny on the beach she made it public and put it on a photo stream and it was soon was being emailed and added to social networks that expressions fantastic so a fairly student has been remixed by people people are adding text and images into this and the there was it it became known as success kid and there's a whole russian news group

dedicated just remix in this image one after another after another then somebody took that image and cut it out and started putting in other images but the meme really took off when it started going on meme generator sites like quick meme on these sites the barrier to getting started is significantly lowered because all you have to do is add some text and it does the rest for you so you get some wonderful examples like this but my favorite because I've got a five-year-old son my favorite one is this one and but but that's not the

end of the story so virgin media picked up on the success of this mean they took summary they changed his name to Tim they flipped him around changed the color of his shirt and put him on a billboard which inevitably led to somebody doing this in the end though everything in the end though everything was okay Lainey G cleared everything up she said that virgin media did pay for the use of the photo so everything's okay never in a million years could she have imagined all this would happen that day at the beach when she

took that photo I'm sort of in shock that's gone from Flickr to meme to virgin media billboards in London and in fact it will also soon appear in vitamin water commercials in the US so really long story of them of a meme there some memes are like jeans they they kind of go viral and this is not only possible today but it's getting easier usually when people talk about memes they often cite things like Lowell cats now lolcat is just literally a picture of a cat with some text or a caption next to him and

these are all over the Internet basically there's more cats than people on the internet I'm sure so but this is this a new idea putting a picture of a cat with some text next to it these been going around for years this is a low cut from 1905 it's a cat in a dress in a chair with a caption what's delaying my dinner well that was obviously hilarious 100 years ago so this isn't new we have an idea we use a tool to realize our idea then we communicate in some way it's just the communicating

stuff is a lot easier than it used to be so if you imagine in 1905 how hard it was to create a lolcat you'd have to physically take the picture and develop it you'd have to add the caption and then you'd have to send it to somebody else through the post now unless you were some kind of newspaper editor the number of people you could impact was going to quite small if you contrast that with quick meme then a few clicks of the button and you can remix this stuff and send it to loads of

people thousands of people almost instantaneously so that were diverse mentioned their remix I think that's really important in fact I think it's so important I think it's right at the heart of digital literacies it's kind of at the other end of the spectrum that elegant consumption I was talking about earlier I mentioned Mozilla just back there Mozilla are the people behind Firefox might recognize that logo they're doing some fantastic work at the moment around learning and they talk about creating a generation of web makers they've got this tool called hack asaurus and it has these

x-ray goggles and what you do is you can see behind the web and you can see how you can remix it using HTML I think Mozilla understand that digital literacy is a condition it's not a threshold it affects your identity because every time you're given a new tool it gives you a different way of impacting upon the world the medium or is there always going to be at least part of the message the trouble is that people who come up with digital literacy frameworks make things a little bit too simplistic they insist on this kind

of linear ordering of skills as if life was that simple and people love talking about like one definition of digital literacy when really what we need to be talking about are digital literacies because they're plural they're context dependent and they need to be socially negotiated I'm going to say that again because it's really important so it's digital literacies they're plural they need to be socially negotiated and they depend heavily upon context if you believe in one digital literacy to rule them all then you're kind of having this fallacy around sequential order on them just explain

that now some of you might not have been alive in the 1990s so you might not remember the bad old days of dial-up modems for those who have never experienced the slowness of a dial-up modem just try going on a UK train on their Wi-Fi it's pretty more the same so back in 1996 I went on the internet for the first time when I was 15 my physics teacher loved ukiyo-e which her pictures the floating world by Japanese artists like hookah zine who is she key and I love these as well I've got them all

on my house so these take a long time to download if you're on a slow connection and there's two ways in which you can you can encode images for the web the first way is sequentially now if you encode an image sequentially what happens is it loads it line by line from the top so if you're in a really slow connection you get like sky sky sky sky oh what's that sky sky sky and so it's really really frustrating so the way that I used to prefer and still prefer is when you encode things progressively

now what that means is you start off with a blurry image and it gets progressively richer in detail as it downloads the information so what I want to argue is the way that we should develop digital literacies is more progressive than sequential we need to say that we develop digital literacies in a kind of linear sequential order I think is really disingenuous because it presupposes some kind of procedure that we as educators or adults or students or people who are training people we didn't go through ourselves that's not the way that we necessarily develop digital

literacies I think the way to develop digital literacies is to focus on people's interests and to try and get them to get this intrinsic motivation to want to develop those digital skills for themselves so if there's a radius of individual interests and there's if isn't a kind of a circle of important issues then the place to develop these digital literacies is the overlap of those two circles does that mean that's kind of a free-form does that mean that anything goes does that mean we should just chuck people out the deep end and tell them to

get on with it well no we do need some kind of structure to some type of framework to hang our ideas on we need some kind of guiding principles some essential elements of digital literacies if you will thankfully I think I can help with that so I've been researching digital literacies for quite a few years now I've compared it with my experience as a teacher in the classroom and at the moment these are what I believe to be the eight essential elements of digital literacies the cognitive the constructive the communicative the Civic the critical the

creative the confidence and the cultural and right at the heart of all of that I believe is the remix let's go back to Sammy or success kid from earlier those people who were remix in those images I think that they demonstrate some of these elements of digital literacies at least the cultural the communicative and the creative and even Virgin Media demonstrated the Civic element of digital literacies by licensing that image to put on their billboards digital literacy practices do change over time for some of you you will not understand what this is it's a five

and a quarter inch floppy disk and you'll not understand why you'd want to use one of those or the cultural practices around it and I'm fairly sure that some people will not understand why anyone would want to do this it looks like she's just pulled them out the ocean is given the kiss of life doesn't it so digital literacy practices do change over time and the examples that I've given you so far being quite frivolous I've given you examples of low cuts and self photograph in French couples but these things can be used seriously and

for real social good the easiest example here would be if I showed you examples of how technology was used during the so-called Arab Spring of early 2011 but I like memes so I'm going to stick with them so in November 2011 there were some students occupying the University of california-davis as part of the worldwide Occupy movement and they refused to move so Lieutenant John Pike came along and decided to casually pepper spray them from point-blank range lots of people took pictures of this and guess what the images got remixed so we get Lieutenant John Pike

inserted in iconic images from history so there he is pepper spraying soldiers putting up the US flag on Iwo Jima during World War two there he is casually pepper spraying Liberty leading the revolution and there he is in Willard's spirit of 76 the thing is that that this is this is quite you know important stuff because memes amplify ideas they make them stick in your imagination they can be used as propaganda by both sides of an argument and kind of grappling with these important issues in playful ways can lead to serious consequences lieutenant Pike was

actually soon suspended pending an investigation so I think that when we're dealing with these memes these low cuts these casual pepper spraying cops were actually speaking at a slightly different language we're immersing ourselves in a different culture somebody who's influenced my thinking a lot is Stephen Downes and he talks of literally speaking in Lowell cats because they've got their own vocabulary it's got their own syntax and spouts on grammar as well so this is the world in which we live this is the world where we can ideas spread very quickly and can be remixed it's

a world where the knowledge skills and ideas that we've got can't be used what learned once for all time because digital literacy practices are constantly in flux it's a lifelong project that all of us need to be involved in so in conclusion I think we need to move beyond mere elegant consumption we need to try and encourage people to remix stuff especially young people because digital literacy practices change over time let's focus on people's interest to develop their own intrinsic motivation and let's start with some kind of progressive framework something like the aid essential elements

of digital literacies thank you for listening and do feel free to remix this presentation you