Week 4 - Digital Literacy

The article on Teen Consumers by Lenhart & Madden (2005) brought a lot of questions to my mind. None of the statistics regarding internet use, movie/music downloading, or content creating really surprised me, but the attitude towards music downloading was disappointing. The attitude that "everyone is doing it" and that it's so easy to do, why shouldn't they do it is a very dangerous trend, and you can only wonder how long it will be until that attitude carries over into other aspects of life. There is no sense of personal responsibility, they even blame the availability of DVD and CD burners for sending mixed messages on whether you should be downloading. I think one way in which this attitude will continue to have a negative trend is in plagarism. The pervasive attitude out there is that if you find it on the internet, it is open season to use as yours (music, information, research).

I also read the tidbit on the ETS developing a standardized test on digital literacy; but sadly its use is not yet widespread. I think this is a great idea, and could possibly be considered even more valuable for today's generation than the SAT. I think that the most important digital literacy skill is to learn how to responsibly use the wealth of information available online. It was mentioned in several of the readings this week that this generation of internet users are fully capable of accessing the information out there, but don't quite know how to interpret that data and determine its validity. Although this is a skill that should be focused on in the K-12 learning environment, it also carries over into the corporate or higher education worlds as well, since today's workforce isbeing increasingly called upon to use the internet to obtain information. As the article by Jones-Kavalier & Flannigan (2006) pointed out, the current American economy depends on how efficiently Americans can obtain a new level of digital literacy. At least in the K-12 environment, often the student is more tech savvy than the instructor or the organization as a whole, which does not bode well for our ability to compete in the global marketplace.
As the Lenhart & Madden (2005) article noted, a huge amount of America's "E-Generation" are now content creators in that they are blogging, creating, and remixing information online. And that article was published in 2005, 3 years ago. The key to innovative instruction which will promote responsible digital literacy is to create learning environments that will allow students to take advantage of what they are already doing in their free time for educational use (similar to our blogging assignment for this class). I think the trend is out there, but is not as widespread as it needs to be.