#dave cormier

The Risk of Hospitality

Digciz is a conversation centered around ideas of Digital Citizenship. The focus this week is on hospitality, in particular, the openness, risk and vulnerability relating to existing in online spaces. My response involves a series of short reflections:

Context First

Peter Skillen recently reflected on a situation where he corrected someone. He was sorry for the way it went about. This had me…

This is the third in a series of conversations around the future of Mozilla's Web Literacy Map. Doug Belshaw caught up with educational researchers and practitioners, Bon Stewart and Dave Cormier, both of whom work at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada.

In a wide-ranging conversation, both Bon and Dave focused on meta issues surrounding the Web Literacy Map. Bon explained that she'd used the map in teaching a course around communications. She found the 'Connecting' strand useful as it allowed her to foreground participatory culture. However, the response from her students was "this is too much! I don't know any of this". Bon had to work hard to move them out of a deficit mindset.

Dave commented that he'd like to use the Web Literacy Map in two contexts. First, in a face-to-face class with mainly low-digital ability students between the ages of 40 and 55. The second is in giant open courses such as #rhizo14. In both situations, Dave wants learners to be able to go in by themselves and be guided through skills and content. They need to be able to 'see themselves' in there, he says.

Bon in particular thought that the current version of the Web Literacy Map misses "examples, contexts, sense of connections and overlaps between concepts". The problem is that it "presents literacies as discrete and reinforces people's default towards skills". Perhaps we could find new and interesting ways to represent the skills and competencies contained on the map, such as overlapping circular diagrams.

Other points made by Bon and Dave were:

The Web Literacy Map doesn't currently represent how literacies are "present and enacted in many learners' lives and practices already". First-time users are inclined to approach it as a map of what they don't have.

The relationship between web literacy and print literacies are not made clear, so the web appears as some kind separate detached sphere. Mozilla should point out that individuals already have skills that are transferable, and point out analogues in the 'offline world'

There's a large piece around 'media literacy' missing - the power structures in media being consumed. This goes beyond what is currently contained under the 'Credibility'competency. They suggested focusing on algorithms, Big Data, and societal norms - although these could be 'cross-cutting themes'.

Dave re-emphasised the need to focus on different ways of framing the Web Literacy Map to enable people new to it to bridge between their existing literacies and new literacies. Both he and Bon thought that examples of people who have learned that skill/competency would be useful, as it humanises what can be quite abstract concepts. Both also agreed that 'Identity' and 'storytelling' would probably work best as cross-cutting themes.