Digital Literacies and Critical Thinking (Critical Digital Literacy)

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This is my very first post using different tools (I’m using MS Word to type as Endnote assists me for references so then I can post the text in the blogger composer window while my laptop locates my missing xmind file). I do this as I reflect on my digital practices and how they have (or not) shaped my life (not my life, the way I live); while some scholars believe that technology is driving the way we live, I firmly believe that this is not a fact but a mere perspective on a broader issue: digital literacy.

Selwyn introduces us to a very interesting discussion: the anti-essentialist approach provides a possible interpretation of technology as texts that can be analyzed in their context and are determined by many factors ; what he is trying to say is that we know what we can do with digital texts (technology) and we decide how to use them, even if there are constraints embedded and make the most of the affordances as it is a social construction (Selwyn, 2012, pp. 84-88).

Credit: http://www.inkmedia.eu/

This is certainly an open invitation to understand that digital literacy needs to be critical, considering that we are readers of these texts and need to use them properly and wisely, which implies critical thinking skills when interacting with digital texts (Hinrichsen & Coombs, 2013, pp. 4-5). It is not about how we interact with digital texts, as the affordances allow users/readers to engage and navigate texts without too much complication; critical thinking skills are necessary to understand that technology is not determining our interactions or our lives, so we can transform it to our needs, and by doing so exploring their whole potential to be used for educational purposes. We as teachers must be critical and digital literate if we want to foster critical thinking  (Gainer, 2012, pp. 15-16) and engage youth to improve their literacy levels.

As a philosophy teacher (and a philosopher) I must promote critical thinking in my students and there are many that share this point of view (Mulnix, 2012), it is a moral obligation in the same way Socrates educated youth in Athens, and I’m willing to take the challenge. So this is the reason why I consider that digital literacy, that I consider is embedded in multimodal literacies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009), is the new approach for critical pedagogies in the 21^st century. We cannot still use the same approaches and critical pedagogy needs to be revised within the frame of globalization so we don’t lose our north when it comes to the purposes and outcomes of education.

Before I go, I leave this video for you to watch. Philosophy should be taught in schools, I'm lucky I come for a country where it is compulsory but I do have a different approach to teach philosophy to teenagers so they can be critical thinkers.

References

Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2009). “Multiliteracies”: New Literacies, New Learning. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 4(3), 164-195. doi:10.1080/15544800903076044

Gainer, J. (2012). Critical Thinking: Foundational for Digital Literacies and Democracy. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 56(1), 14-17. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.libraryproxy.griffith.edu.au/stable/23367754

Hinrichsen, J., & Coombs, A. (2013). The five resources of critical digital literacy: a framework for curriculum integration. Research in Learning Technology, 21. doi:10.3402/rlt.v21.21334

Mulnix, J. W. (2012). Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 44(5), 464-479. doi:doi:10.1111/j.1469-5812.2010.00673.x

Selwyn, N. (2012). Making sense of young people, education and digital technology: the role of sociological theory. Oxford Review of Education, 38(1), 81-96. doi:10.1080/03054985.2011.577949