Week 2:Digital Literacy Skills

Even though, I am one of the ‘natives of cyberspace’, when I face new kinds of digital technology, I oftentimes struggle to be familiar with. For example, I used one of the social web sites called ‘Cyworld’ in Korea, but I came to America, and I get to know other kinds of social web pages such as ‘Facebook’ or ‘Twitter’; these were totally new to me. I didn’t know how to post things, and how to be friend with other users, or how to communicate with them. However, as times goes by, I gradually get used to those things, and now it is very comfortable for me to interact with others through ‘Facebook’, ‘Skype’, and so on. Of course, I have to admit that young people are more easily adjust to new digital technology than older people, but it is not true that they are born digitally savvy people. This is why education about digital literacy for both young students and older people should be provided to assist them to be quickly adapt to rapidly changing digital technology.

During I was reading articles for week2; there was an interesting comparison between digital/visual literacies and language acquisition in the article ‘Connecting the Digital Dots: Literacy of the 21st Century’. The author of the article mentions, “Children learn these skills as part of their lives, like language, which they learn without realizing they are learning it. Adults who did not grow up with technology continue to adapt from iteration to iteration. The senior population approaches the new literacy like a foreign language that is complex and perhaps of questionable use.(Jones-Kavalier R. B. & Flannigan L. S., 2006)”.

Barbara R. Jones-Kavalier and Suzanne L. Flannigan (2006). Connecting the Digital Dots: Literacy of the 21st Century. Educause Quarterly, 29(2), Retrieved on January 24, 2011 from http://www.educause.edu/apps/eq/eqm06/eqm0621.asp