THE IMPORTANCE OF OPENNESS WITHIN DIGITAL LITERACY

摘要

The paper argues that in order to support the necessary holistic understanding of Digital Literacy, one needs to take into account the change in knowledge production, management and consumptions that we have been witnessing in the last couple of decades, mainly connected with the pervasiveness of ICT and with the raise of social online practices. In an increasingly connected society where sharing is becoming in many cases the norm, we consider that a fundamental component of Digital Literacy should be the capacity to work in the open, sharing beyond our circles the knowledge we produce and making use of knowledge produced by others, in a transparent and traceable way. We cannot dream of open societies, open innovation and open education if we do not acquire the basic capacity to adopt open approaches in our daily activities: acquiring these basic capacities means becoming openness literate. In order to understand whether (and to which extent) openness-related competences are included in existing Digital Literacy approaches, the paper briefly analyses two well-known Digital Literacy frameworks: the one by JISC, the UK national agency in charge of ICT in education, and the one from the Mozilla Foundation - a pioneering institution working on the relation between internet and society. We have been looking for the potential impact of these frameworks in developing the capacity to work in the open, by searching for the way each component of the frameworks (being a skill, an area of activity, or something else) is thereby declined in terms of sharing, open licensing etc. The first conclusion is that the two frameworks are fully in line with the holistic understanding of Digital Literacy that is required to build active and participative citizens. Such a holistic view of Digital Literacy is particularly important in the education field, where using ICT can be understood as both instrumental to general learning purposes and as an area of reflection per-se. Along these lines, we argue that being able to work in the open should not only be a fundamental literacy requirement for citizens, but also a prerequisite for teachers at all educational levels, especially if we want our schools to work in a connected way, learning across cultures and through collaboration. An important recent development in this domain is the DigCompEdu project by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission in Seville, which aims to develop a digital competence framework for educators at European level, with the aim to inform and reinforce national initiatives in the field under a common umbrella. The DigCompEdu is an important step in the right direction for stakeholders to understand the importance of embedding openness as a key feature of collaboration within Digital Literacy practices. Still, research need to further inform present and future policies in this evolving field, along three interrelated dimensions of literacy practice: an operational dimension that includes the skills and competences that enable individuals to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media, a sociocultural dimension that refers to developing a repertoire of digital literacy practices in specific social and cultural contexts, and a critical dimension that recognises that meaning-making resources are selective and often operate as a means of social control and social exclusion. In conclusion, we argue that contemporary Digital Literacy initiatives, building on efforts such as the ones by JISC, Mozilla or the European Commission, should aim at transforming citizens - and educators - into critically literate actors able not simply to participate competently in digital practices but also to transform these practices actively and creatively, in a collaborative and open way.