Digital technologies have changed the world for the better. They have made communication, entertainment, and learning more accessible. Teens spend most of their time with their smartphones, tablets, and gaming consoles, playing games or interacting with their peers online. The technologies are also useful for learning new things via the internet or by sharing ideas with others. The presence of these technologies has changed the perception about how learning should take place, but at the heart of successful learning, digital literacy is critical. The literacy has three components, which are the locating and consuming digital content, creating the content, and communicating the same digital content. When students master digital literacy, it is easier to take charge of their online learning, making productive and successful. One area where digital technologies have practical application in class is promoting writing, and digital tools make it easier for students to learn or master writing in a collaborative environment. Teachers find the same tools useful because they make teaching easier as they can provide students with specific feedback as well as teach effectively. Digital technologies have also found application is improving access to learning by making content delivery easier and learning resources free. Students who could not access quality education can now access it much easier thanks to advances in digital technologies. Therefore, the integration of digital technologies in teaching and learning is improving the quality of learning and widening access to education.
What is digital literacy, and why does it matter?
Digital literacy has three main processes, which are locating and consuming digital content, creating the content, and communicating the same digital content. Digital content is vast, and discovering it is tasking. Therefore, for learners, it is vital to master the skill of locating the right content, defined as information that is relevant, trustworthy, and up-to-date. Practical web search skills are a necessary ingredient to educational learning in the digital world, but it is often challenging to teach those skills (Harris, Mishra & Koehler, 2009). However, the essential skills for the student to learn how to locate digital content include domain knowledge, knowledge of how search engines work, basic literacy, and a working knowledge of resources available online such as online databases, Google Scholar, among others.
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Mastery of content creation is also an essential component of digital literacy. However, the process of digital content creation is not complicated. Ordinarily, students and teachers create content using various media and web 2.0 tools. From the perspective of teachers, using digital content such as journal articles and free online books can reduce the time teachers spend to create the same material for distribution to students (Robin, 2008). When students can easily access digital content, then the teacher can spend more time discussing and engaging students in the content, and that enhances learning outcome (Bell, 2011). Students can create their content such as video via various free video manipulation tools, smartphones, among others. The tools enhance learning as they are exciting, and the final product looks professional. Moreover, using digital tools makes learning student-centered.
For digital learning to be educationally relevant, students must learn to communicate it. Communication can take the form of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, forums, and other places where users can post their content. In schools with an online portal, students can post their content for others to read and comment. The communication process introduces an element of immediacy and collaboration. Moreover, with digital tools, the learning process can be intimate and personalized while widening the audience (Fini, 2009). One productive method of communicating is curating content, which is an engaging and useful learning experience. During curation, students have to learn different things, comprehend them, and then arrange them based on a theme and similar criteria.
Should teachers engage the writing process using digital tools?
The rise of digital technologies has created opportunities for using digital tools in the classroom for instruction purposes. Teens or high school students spend an average of the nine hours daily using various types of media. The media include watching TV, watching videos online, playing video games, listening to music, reading books online, using the internet, social media, and other activities with their smartphones or the tablet computers (Mcloughlin & Lee, 2010). The implication is that students spend more time in front of the screen than in school and even sleeping. The immersion in technology has created opportunities for learning using digital technology because students are learning differently (Kreijns, Acker, Vermeulen & Buuren, 2013). The interest in technology implies that teachers need to adopt new pedagogy techniques that tap into the attention of the students in technology, as doing so makes learning enjoyable.
Social media tools l such as Facebook, improves student writing. Posting content on social media and commenting provide opportunities for honing writing and communication skills. Students get the opportunities to write in different formats such as prose while getting the chance to engage their peers or even their teachers on the same platforms. Facebook also offers tools for peer learning. For instance, the teacher can create a private group for students to the post content and engage each other. For each post, peers can post a comment commenting on various aspects of writing. With such a collaborative approach, learning can take place social media platforms where students spend most of their time. It is also easier for fellow students to offer feedback on an open platform.
Collaboration is a critical component in enhancing learning. When teachers place students together with their high performing peers in a collaborative environment, the act enhances learning. In sports and families, the process is evident, where positive attitudes and values spread within the team. The same case applies when writing using digital tools such as Facebook. Educators understand the importance of collaborative learning, but in the traditional classroom and existing pedagogue, implementing such an environment is not easy (Sadik, 2008). Digital tools have made it easier to implement collaborative learning.
Competitive learning leads to outcomes, not suitable to the modern economy and emerging jobs. When individuals are encouraged to compete via rewards, the results are the top-performing students continue to excel. The motivation to win provides a powerful incentive to continue to improve. However, for other students, poor results demotivate, and the result is a poor achievement, so achievement levels start to diverge. The poor performance is not indicative of potential, but the design of learning leads to adverse outcomes. If teachers want to enhance results, competition should involve smaller teams, or the whole class should compete to achieve a bigger goal (García‐Peñalvo, Figuerola & Merlo, 2010). When students learn that they are contributing to the attainment of a higher purpose, they feel motivated, and classroom dynamic improves considerably. The incentive is for students to collaborate to solve problems, but not to win.
The value of digital tools in writing is promoting collaboration. In addition to social media such as Facebook, other means of mastering writing commonly used by teachers include interactive whiteboards, website, wiki, blog, Google docs, and Moodle. The tasks student can complete using the tools include researching information online. For instance, they can study the meaning of a word online or get access to free resources. Students can also submit assignments online, participate in online discussions, edit or revise content via collaborative writing tools such as google docs, give feedback to peer work, post their written work online, among other things.
An increasing number of educators now view digital technologies as valuable tools. They enable educators to understand their students better during online interactions and feedback they offer to their peers. Also, the interactive nature of the devices allows educators to manipulate student writing interactively (Goldie, 2016). For students, they learn to edit their work of those of others, and in doing so, improve their writing skills. A typical teaching technique for writing to foster better writing is curation, where students are asked to get samples of good and bad writing based on specific parameters.
The internet has made it easier to get countless high-quality writing samples as well as bad writing. The tools used for those tasks are Elmo and WebAssign. In addition to providing students with opportunities to improve their writing, interactive writing tools, allow teachers to provide specific feedback where students can improve their writing. As students continue to work on the suggested amendments, the quality of their writing improves. Finally, by working on their work and those of others, students learn to identify and appreciate good writing. The skill is invaluable to quality writing.
How open learning networks, transforming communication, authorship, expertise, teaching & learning
In the last few years, interest in open learning has increased driven mostly by the open educational resources (OER) and MOOCs. Open learning takes the form of education for all, where access to education is free or at low cost. The funding usually comes from the public or state. Secondly, open learning takes the form of open-access programs, which leads to a recognized qualification from open universities. Learning in these universities is flexible and sometimes online-based.
However, learning under open education is, in some cases, not structured, but interested students have access to the various individual courses or programs with no formal credit, but students can get badges or certificate of completion. MOOCs fall under this category of open learning. Open textbooks are free for students to use, and open research is research papers, which are free to access. Currently, most research is published in mainstream journals and is only available after paying for access as an individual subscriber or through universities.
The quest for affordable university education led to the founding of the hundreds of open universities around the world. Open universities have flexible learning schedules and most increasingly offer their courses online. In Europe and most parts of the world, governments fund those universities. However, in the United States, there is no publicly funded open university, but a few various organizations have established universities to serve that niche (Gasevic, Kovanovic, Joksimovic & Siemens, 2014). One of those universities is Western Governor’s University and Phoenix University. MOOCs from leading universities have received a lot of attention for the same reasons.
Despite the flexibility of open learning, minimum levels of literacy are still required. Some form of minimum literacy is necessary because learning online require basics such as content creation and communication. Students need to know how to install specific software on their computer or at least access the learning portal. However, their main benefit is giving students access to education continuingly. Adults in demanding careers can still further their knowledge despite their busy schedules. Also, open learning improves access to learning as they are affordable. With modern technologies such as the internet, poor students can get an excellent education without incurring too much debt to finance their education (Kop, 2011). They can also further their learning as they continue to work. Traditionally, such students could not get access to higher education.
Another emerging concept is open learning is self-learning to gain specific skills. Traditionally, students went to colleges to get formal credit useful when looking for jobs. However, with the rise of new careers such as programming, formal credits are not as helpful as demonstrable skills. Thus, with MOOCs, students enroll in specific classes to gain skills such as photography, drawing, design, and other in-demand skills. On freelancing websites, clients often prefer skills as opposed to the formal credits. Because MOOCs are free, access to education has improved considerably.
Learning networks are also transforming authorship, learning, and the results as positive. Commercial college textbooks cost more than 100 dollars, and the cost of books is a significant cost in college/university education. The cost of learning materials has contributed significantly to the rise in the cost of a college education. Therefore, experts consider the cost of learning materials as a step in managing college education. In attainment towards that goal, open resources have emerged as an alternative to the commercial textbooks. These resources are free for students, but quality the authors do not compromise quality. A study by University of Georgia found that college students provided with free learning materials perform significantly better than their colleagues who do not get the materials.
Open learning materials give students greater access and flexibility. The materials are delivered digitally with the option of a student paying extra to get a print textbook. However, because the resources are openly licensed, students can print their materials or download them for offline viewing. Free resources are promoting equity to students who were not served by traditional models due to the high cost of learning materials.
Conclusion
In summary, there are clear benefits of integrating digital technologies in teaching and learning. Students enjoy the benefits as they can learn in a way similar to how they use digital tools for other uses such as entertainment. For teaching, the tools offer a way of delivering student-centered learning, which is interesting for students and makes it easier to track student progress. However, the main benefit is the ability to make learning, collaborative, an approach that offers an inclusive learning environment. The same tools make it easier to provide education cheaply via open resources without the need to purchase expensive commercial textbooks. For poor students who cannot fund expensive education, open education network improves access to quality education. In the end, access to education improves chances for all, and that means open education promotes equity in society.
References
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