Orange Unit: A Person-Centered Launch
2A: Critical Social + Technical Perspective
Background Knowledge Probe
- In what ways have you been shaped by technology? When, where, how, and why?
- In what ways have you helped to shape technology? When, where, how, and why?
- In what ways have the people closest to you been shaped, positively and negatively, by this shaping of technology? When, where, how, and why?
Community Inquiry as the Basis for Digital Literacy Radically Reconsidered
Literacy is a set of competencies and knowledge within a certain domain. Digital literacy, then, is literacy within the realm of digital information and communication technologies. Summarizing a variety of definitions regarding digital literacy and related computational thinking, this set of competencies includes:
- Technical skills: The ability to appropriately select and effectively use a range of technologies.
- Information skills: The ability to seek, evaluate, interpret, and apply relevant and trustworthy information across multiple media.
- Cognitive skills: The ability to logically analyze and organize problems in ways that allow use of digital and other tools to help solve them and to generalize new processes to other problems.
- Socio-emotional skills: The ability to communicate and collaborate with others, along with the personal confidence, persistence, and tolerance needed to tackle complex, ambiguous, and open-ended problems.
- Application skills: The ability to integrate the above skills into our everyday experiences in order to advance our professional, personal, and civic interests and responsibilities.
If we are to assure active participation in civic society and meaningful, diverse and inclusive contributions to vibrant, informed, and engaged community, it is essential to add the social justice-oriented progressive community [inter]action and critical social + technical skills to these other five points.
- The critical social + technical skills are brought forward as part of person- and community-centered deliberative dialogue processes using critical research paradigms, pedagogies, and abductive reasoning in combination with each of the five commonly considered digital literacy skills listed above.
- Progressive community [inter]action skills are simultaneously used in combination with the starting five digital literacy skills by advancing our ability to work together in communities of inquiry that make continued use of collective leadership, functional diversity, members’ capability sets and freedom of choice to better achieve valued beings and doings, community cultural wealth, and care work and ethics.
Whether as part of preprofessional and professional development of library and information management workers, or as part of programming offered by these professionals, a radical reconsideration of digital literacy is essential if we are to effectively use sociotechnical products to amplify human forces which advance human and community development. T