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Digital Literacy Essay

704 Words3 Pages

In contrast to the idea of "digital native", since late last century the idea of digital literacy has been coined, and within this, the notion of digital skills: the new technologies require specific knowledge and skills for their use, and an understanding of how to use them in context. The concept of digital literacy (Gilster, 1997) was first defined broadly as the ability to understand and use information in multiple formats from a variety of sources, when presented via computer. The term refers to the conceptual mastery of new tools rather than a technical one: Knowing how to use them would imply not only operational aspects, but especially cognitive and socioeomotional aspects (see also Bawden, 2008; Lankshear & Knobel, 2008). Included …show more content…

Van Deursen and van Dijk (2014) resume this perspective, but stating that the great diversity of definitions makes it difficult to have a clear characterization of digital skills. Therefore, they propose a definition of digital skills, both conceptual and operational, in four sequential domains: Operational, formal, information and strategic. The authors understand by operational skills the actions that allow a person to use digital media tools, such as navigation bars, buttons or links, different ways to input information in fields or pages, possibilities to download or save files and similar. As for the formal skills, they refer to navigation and orientation in structures specific to digital media (in essence, hypertextual), such as knowing which website one is in, identifying how to navigate each site, orienting oneself or getting lost while performing a task. The information skills are related to knowing how to search, select and assess the information from internet in its various forms (text, image, video). Finally, strategic skills involve the

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