14 Digital Literacy
David Squires
Between Making and Integrating Digital Technology
Advocacy for digital literacy often falls along a spectrum from making to integrating computing technologies. We can see this tendency in the excitement over maker spaces and technology integration. Pedagogically, both have their value, as articulated in the representative statements from Educause and Edutopia:
“Makerspaces allow students to take control of their own learning as they take ownership of projects they have not just designed but defined.”[1]
“Technology, when integrated into the curriculum, revolutionizes the learning process. More and more studies show that technology integration in the curriculum improves students’ learning processes and outcomes.”[2]
If maker spaces let students become better producers, technology integration lets them become savvier consumers. While maker spaces emphasize student agency and technical creativity, technology integration emphasizes student awareness and technical proficiency. Both, however, come with a high price tag, making them unfeasible options for many instructors. Creating Open Educational Resources (OERs) with students offers one possible synthesis for making and integrating at a scale that Paul Fyfe calls “mid-sized digital pedagogy.”[3] Working with students on an open textbook promotes collaboration with affordable tools while also letting students stay focused on course content.
When students begin to produce open textbooks, they necessarily delve into the subject area of the course. The task demands at the outset a level of systematic thinking that course materials assume in advance. Textbook authors and college professors usually take responsibility for course design and so set the parameters for student learning. By contrast, creating open textbooks as a class project invites professors and students to enter into a collaborative process for deciding what content to feature and how to organize it. One of the most challenging—but also energizing—aspects of creating OERs in my experience came at the beginning of the project when students divided the chapter topics for a textbook on social media. They had to ask critical questions about what counts as comprehensive knowledge and how best to sequence learning from the fundamental to the more specialized. Before ever worrying about software for layout and publishing, students immersed themselves in the secondary literature and research materials. Importantly, they drew on previously published open textbooks where possible, which pushed the collaborative experience beyond the walls of our classroom to a wider academic community. Students realized quickly that they had a responsibility to both the authors who went before them and the readers who might use their textbook.
Because I teach digital cultural studies my courses can unify digital literacy instruction with course content, perhaps more than other subjects. For my purposes, having students create an open