Digital literacies – a revolution in communication.

Nicky Hockly published a very interesting article on digital literacies where she explains what they are, why it is so important to include them in our classrooms and the different sub-skills that we can find. In this post, I will concentrate on the definition and how they have revolutionized communication. 

In the article, Hockly asserts that ‘digital literacies refer to our ability to effectively make use of the technologies at our disposal.’ That is to say, it is not limited to how to use technology but it includes the social practices that surround the use of new media.  As we all know, communication nowadays is increasingly digitally mediated so, if we want our learners to be communicatively competent, they need to learn digital skills.

In ‘Digital Literacies’, Julia Gillen and David Barton explain how a revolution in communication is taking place since reading and writing are being affected by digital literacies: texts are becoming intensely multimodal, that is, image is ever-increasingly appearing with writing, and even displacing writing where it had previously been dominant. Also, screens (of the digital media) are replacing the page and the book as the dominant media.

Simultaneously, the concept of ‘design’ appears. Both the making of text and the reading of text demands much more attention to all possible means of making meaning. In text-making, design requires the apt use of all resources (modes, genres, syntax, font, layout) appropriate to content and to audience. Design is also at work in text ‘reception’: multimodal texts, with their organisation on visual principles, and their multiple entry points offer and even expect the reader to construct the order of reading for her/himself. That is to say, the reader is not only reader but he/she also becomes the author of the text.

As we can see, in this not-that-new digital world, not only texts or the media where they appear change but also the role of text-maker and text-receiver. As teachers, if we want our students to be fully functional citizens in the 21^st century, we should be acquainted with this new literacies and promote their development in our classrooms. For that, we should bear in mind that developing digital literacies means working to enable students to develop their understandings of and skills in using certain tools, not as decontextualized competencies but in ways that are connected to other aspects of their learning.