Digital Literacy is changing the World                                                                                       Marilyn Schindler

The social media technological tools have risen to an exponential rate for this form of visual marketing and digital literacies. There are limitations of use of these services and the article reported by Gillen & Barton (2010) who emphasized how practice by teachers and society is examined. "The distinctive contribution of the approach to literacy as social practice lies in the ways in which it involves careful and sensitive attention to what people do with texts, how they make sense of them and use them to further their own purposes in their own learning lives" (Gillen and Barton, 2010, p. 9). Social practice of digital technology was examined by school systems in New South Wales and in Australia. Both people’s use of their texts and the impact on teachers are important in this article. The way that people of digital technology use social media is described. A substantial change is taking place for developers to address.

Information systems of today are filling the economy with people and businesses that want to provide the users of hardware, software with high-teach digital media systems to communicate their needs. Digital literacies is an emphasis on how users and developers compute devices and skills on computer networks. Awareness of critical literacy practices help students to identify their needs and use of texts. Developers of concepts and the study of digital literacies and the process is discussed now at great length. Gillen & Barton’s article describes the qualifications and skills of employers, certification of people to perform tasks. Emphasis was placed on developing systems of qualification for use of digital technology for employers to examine the user’s capacities for their use. “But as long as highly skilled, specialist individuals are required in the workplace then individually-based assessments will continue at some scale” (Gillen & Barton, 2010, p. 4). Gillen and Barton’s article suggests that a new literacy is to have the technology to make available resources for teachers, educators, students, and children.         

There are more hosts, servers, computer chips, and connections to the internet. Millions of people are using this technology more than people ever thought previously. In the article it is stated that millions more users will be on the internet in the future. Marketing for food and personal products is the new economy.  This article pointing out that many statistics coming from New South Wales and Australia regarding computer technology being used and the impact on people in general.

In regard to my use of digital literacies, I use the iPhone for calls, texting, images and email. My use is challenged by constant updating, maintenance and uploading and downloading of applications and for manipulating the technological tools involved. This is evident in the article by Gillen & Barton regarding people’s use of social media. We are changing in the world because of communication technology has developed into a necessary tool for everyone who can access the internet. All the applications available provided by computer, iPhone, all the other technological applications such as iPod, iPads, and social media providing a social media connections.  Educators and technology experts have been meeting about how teaching and learning through TLRP (Technology Enhanced Learning) can be more effective and how it should be designed.  Noss, R. (2010) explained that there are two research councils, Social Research Council and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to collaborate and support this ideology. Noss (2010) suggests that there is a need by digital technology users to put into practice their communications. These councils plan on addressing the complex issues for users. The environment for learning is being evaluated by educators and to lead teachers and society to upgrade their skills and how to engage using these skills. The article points to the importance of creating tools to accommodate these needs (Gillen & Barton, 2010, p. 22).

There are many challenges in education. “To date [i.e., 1985] there has been no widespread testing of literacy levels in adult New Zealanders, and there are no figures claiming accurately to portray the extent of adult illiteracy in this country” (Lankshear & Knobel, 2010, p. 4).  The purpose seemed to be that people must have skills to use the social media tools based on the disclosures reported by educators and developers from New Zealand. “We address the development of classroom approaches to critical literacy in the context of a larger concern of education for active citizenship in the 1990s” (Lankshear & Knobel, 2010, p.76). Understanding literacy and the technology of this social way of networking is in a ‘speedy-access’ mode and in constant development.  “We now understand literacies as socially created constitutive elements of larger human-practices-discourses-that humans construct around their myriad purposes and values” (Lankshear & Knobel, 2010, p. 76). This is how developing and working with texts includes the attitudes and beliefs of the users. The New Zealand approach was constructed for human purpose and their use and a collection of essays were included in Colin Lankshear’s and Michele Knobel’s book.

This ‘keeping up’ with all the images to post, updates for the user is time consuming and tweeting and sharing photos in all the many networks needed to output the images.  The actual ‘know how’ to crop your image and size the image for Instagram, Facebook, and all the other social media blogs. Social media products such as the iPhone provide a marketing tool for profit makers. The keeping up of this digital technology is only one aspect and the training or education of how to use it is the other component for using it. The communication of American society and the world must have developers consistently developing new software and conduct more research for the changing literacy studies.  

Reference:

Gillen, J., Barton, D. (2010) Digital Literacies: A research briefing by the Technology Enhanced Learning phase of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme. E.S.R. C. Economic & Social 

Research Council. University of London, UK.

Lankshear C., Knobel, M. (2011). Literacies Social, Cultural and Historical Perspectives, NY, NY. Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.

Literacy and the new technologies in school education: Meeting the l (IT)eracy challenge? (n.d)>The Free Library. (2014). Retrieved Sept 07, 2014 from http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Literay+and+the+new+technologies+in+school+education%3a+Meeting+the...-a0631320991

Noss, R. (2008) Preface. In N. Selwyn (ed.) Education 2.0? Designing the web for teaching and learning. Institute of Education, University of London: TLRP-TEL.