We live in a society largely driven by science and technology. As more scientific and technological issues dominate public debates at national and international levels, it is important to ensure that our students become global citizens who are scientifically literate. However, many students have poor attitudes and low engagement levels toward the learning of science. This book puts forward an argument that we should capitalise on the affordances that digital technologies offer in enabling better science learning, the general technological interest and knowledge of young people and the motivating influence of technology for learning, to foster the development of scientific literacy in students.
Just as the majority of books about computer literacy deal more with technological issues than with literacy issues, most computer literacy programs overemphasize technical skills and fail to adequately prepare students for the writing and communications tasks in a technology-driven era. Multiliteracies for a Digital Age serves as a guide for composition teachers to develop effective, full-scale computer literacy programs that are also professionally responsible by emphasizing different kinds of literacies and proposing methods for helping students move among them in strategic ways. Defining computer literacy as a domain of writing and communication, Stuart A. Selber addresses the questions that few other computer literacy texts consider: What should a computer literate student be able to do? What is required of literacy teachers to educate such a student? How can functional computer literacy fit within the values of teaching writing and communication as a profession? Reimagining functional literacy in ways that speak to teachers of writing and communication, he builds a framework for computer literacy instruction that blends functional, critical, and rhetorical concerns in the interest of social action and change. Multiliteracies for a Digital Age reviews the extensive literature on computer literacy and critiques it from a humanistic perspective. This approach, which will remain useful as new versions of computer hardware and software inevitably replace old versions, helps to usher students into an understanding of the biases, belief systems, and politics inherent in technological contexts. Selber redefines rhetoric at the nexus of technology and literacy and argues that students should be prepared as authors of twenty-first-century texts that defy the established purview of English departments. The result is a rich portrait of the ideal multiliterate student in a digital age and a social approach to computer literacy envisioned with the requirements for systemic change in mind.
Multiliteracies and Early Years Innovation: Perspectives from Finland and Beyond brings together internationally renowned scholars to investigate and reflect upon the significance of introducing multiliteracies in the education of children (0–8 years old) and the challenge of enhancing professional development opportunities of early years practitioners. The book brings together curriculum innovation and reform and the changing media ecology of young children's learning lives in a single volume. It provides insights into Finnish early years education in terms of policy, practice, and research with a specific focus on the enhancement of children’s multiliteracies. Case studies from around the world explore co-developing practices between researchers and teachers, the development of communities and the ways in which different classroom interventions draw on new kinds of teacher knowledge. This book will appeal to academics, researchers, and postgraduate students with an interest in early years education, literacy education, the sociology of digital culture, school reform, teacher education, and comparative education.
In this practical guide, literacy experts show teachers how to use project-based inquiry to build students’ discipline-specific skills and knowledge in grades 6–12. The authors present a five-phase framework that incorporates their professional development experience working with over 3,000 teachers. By making the intuitive practices of the disciplines explicit within an inquiry process, students have opportunities to construct new knowledge by employing practices used by literary critics, scientists, historians, and mathematicians. Read, Write, Inquire responds to the current focus on disciplinary literacy across multiple sets of standards, offering a clear blueprint to help teachers meet these standards while also providing students with deep learning across the curriculum. “This unique approach encourages students to adopt sophisticated literacy practices in the same way the disciplines developed them—as a natural outgrowth of knowledge creation.” —Timothy Shanahan, distinguished professor emeritus, University of Illinois at Chicago
People currently live in a digital age in which technology is now a ubiquitous part of society. It has become imperative to develop and maintain a comprehensive understanding of emerging innovations and technologies. Information and Technology Literacy: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications is an authoritative reference source for the latest scholarly research on techniques, trends, and opportunities within the areas of digital literacy. Highlighting a wide range of topics and concepts such as social media, professional development, and educational applications, this multi-volume book is ideally designed for academics, technology developers, researchers, students, practitioners, and professionals interested in the importance of understanding technological innovations.
Digital knowledge maps are ‘at a glance’ visual representations that enable enriching, imaginative and transformative ways for teaching and learning, with the potential to enhance positive educational outcomes. The use of such maps has generated much attention and interest among tertiary education practitioners and researchers over the last few years as higher education institutions around the world begin to invest heavily into new technologies designed to provide online spaces within which to build resources and conduct activities. The key elements of this edited volume will comprise original and innovative contributions to existing scholarship in this field, with examples of pedagogical possibilities as they are currently practiced across a range of contexts. It will contain chapters that address, theory, research and practical issues related to the use of digital knowledge maps in all aspects of tertiary education and draws predominantly on international perspectives with a diverse group of invited contributors. Reports on empirical studies as well as theoretical/conceptual chapters that engage deeply with pertinent questions and issues raised from a pedagogical, social, cultural, philosophical, and/or ethical standpoint are included. Systematic literature reviews dealing with digital knowledge mapping in education are also an integral part of the volume.
This book addresses the issues confronting educators in the integration of digital technologies into their teaching and their students’ learning. Such issues include a skepticism of the added value of technology to educational learning outcomes, the perception of the requirement to keep up with the fast pace of technological innovation, a lack of knowledge of affordable educational digital tools and a lack of understanding of pedagogical strategies to embrace digital technologies in their teaching. This book presents theoretical perspectives of learning and teaching today’s digital students with technology and propose a pragmatic and sustainable framework for teachers’ professional learning to embed digital technologies into their repertoire of teaching strategies in a systematic, coherent and comfortable manner so that technology integration becomes an almost effortless pedagogy in their day-to-day teaching. The materials in this book are comprised of original and innovative contributions, including empirical data, to existing scholarship in this field. Examples of pedagogical possibilities that are both new and currently practised across a range of teaching contexts are featured.
The world of higher education is entering a new phase in its history. Now, and in the coming decades, the ubiquitous role of digital technology will dramatically influence the manner in which teaching and learning are designed and delivered. This book encourages faculty to adopt a proactive stance in relation to technology through the use of engaging digital tools that promote skill acquisition and inspire critical thinking in today’s college students (and tomorrow’s leaders). The book delineates a conceptual model for digital learning, and provides specific examples of digital tools and their possible applications for teaching and learning. It will also assist faculty in making the leap to operationalizing that model within the context of the courses they teach, by highlighting how to identify instructional priorities and match digital tools with identified needs.
In the 21st century, digital tools enable information to be generated faster and in greater profusion than ever before, to the point where its extent and value are literally beyond imagining. Such quantities can only be meaningfully addressed using more digital tools, and thus our relationship to information is fundamentally changed. This situation presents a particular challenge to processes of learning and teaching, and demands a response from both information professionals and educators. Enabling education in a digital environment means not only changing the form in which learning opportunities are offered, but also enabling students to survive and prosper in digitally based learning environments. This collection brings together a global community of educators, educational researchers, librarians and IT strategists, to consider how learners need to be equipped in an educational environment that is increasingly suffused with digital technology. Traditional notions of literacy need to be challenged, and new literacies, including information literacy and IT literacy, need to be considered as foundation elements for digitally involved learners. Leading international experts from the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Mexico and throughout Europe contribute to the debate, and Hannelore Rader, Librarian and Dean of the University Libraries, University of Louisville, Kentucky, provides the foreword. The book is in two parts: In Part 1, Literacies in the Digital Age, the contributors analyse how digital technologies have enabled transformative change in the ways in which learning can be constructed, and discuss the nature of the new literacies that have emerged in this new virtual and e-learning environment. In Part 2, Enabling and Supporting Digital Literacies, the contributors go on to consider the ways in which digital literacies can be made available to learners, and how these literacies are being relocated in a more student-centred environment within the broader perspective of learning. Readership: This book takes the issues raised in the successful Information and IT Literacy, also co-edited by Allan Martin, into a broader context. It is essential reading for all information professionals and educators involved in developing strategies and practices for learning in a digital age.
This book constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Information Literacy, ECIL 2017, held in Saint Malo, France, in September 2017. The 84 revised papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 358 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics in the field of information literacy and focus on information literacy in the workplace. They are organized in the following topical sections: workplace information literacy, employibility and career readiness; data literacy and research data management; media literacy; copyright literacy; transliteracy, reading literacy, digital literacy, financial literacy, search engine literacy, civic literacy; science literacy; health information literacy; information behavior; information literacy in higher education; information literacy in K-12; information literacy instruction; information literacy and libraries; and theoretical framework.
