Digital literacy 2: Reach out and connect

One of the digital literacies I identified in yesterday's blogpost was effective social networking. So what's the big deal about this? We all do it these days don't we? Most of us have a Facebook account, and maybe a LinkedIn account too. Lots of us use Twitter, and some of those out on the periphery may still be using Myspace or Bebo. What else do we need to learn about social networking that can help us or our students to learn better? In this series I'm going to examine digital literacies. I use the term not to describe skills, but more as an alignment to the argument that as we engage with our own specific culture we acquire and develop more than skills. If I am illiterate (in the sense of reading and writing), I cannot read the signs or engage with text - I am not able to fully participate within my culture. And if I miss the meaning of something because of that illiteracy, I won't know what I don't know. Literacy allows us to develop a self awareness of not only the symbolic nature of our world but also the processes of personal learning - or meta-cognition - and in so doing we build what Bourdieu has termed 'cultural capital'. Wendy Earle's 2005 discussion on the nature of literacies is a useful starting point.

So what are the essential components of social networking as a digital literacy? Firstly, I believe we need to network more smartly, particularly in a manner that helps us to learn more effectively in both formal and informal contexts. Jonathan Rose has some interesting things to say about how social networking helps his off-line (for this read 'real life') world. In his blogpost What's so social about social media? he outlines three functions: supplementing, sifting and sustaining, all of which have a social dimension. Sifting for example, in Jonathan's view, helps to combat the media atomisation that has occurred due to the availability of hundreds of TV channels. Once we could all sit down for coffee and talk about what we had watched on TV last night. It's rare we are able to do this now, with so many choices. Watching TV is no longer a distributed communal activity. What we can do though, with the aid of social media, is to find out what our commonalities and communities are through the filtering tools (such as hashtags) on Twitter and other timeline tools.

Social networking also helps us to find content we need, when we need it. In some of my previous slide presentations and blog posts I have quoted Karen Stephenson, who believes we now 'store our knowledge in our friends'. By this she means a distributed intelligence is emerging which allows that it doesn't matter how much we can store and retrieve from our own personal memories. Today, it's not what we know, but who we know that is most important. We now live in an increasingly connected world where we have 24/7 access to our friends and colleagues. Selecting the right tools that will enable each of us to connect into and plunder the collective intelligence of the most relevant communities of practice is one of the new digital literacies professionals and students will need to draw upon.

Finally, social networking skills will require each user to also be adept at connecting with new friends and fellow community members. But how will we know who to connect with and who to ignore? It's not as if we are in a large room at a party, deciding who looks or sounds like the most interesting person to make a bee-line for. No, it's actually more complex and information rich than that. We now have the ability to tap into all sorts of information about the bewildering number of people we encounter on social media every day. We can see by their avatar and username (sometimes) what kind of person they might be, and whether it would be interesting to connect with them or not. Profiles and follow/follower information are also useful sources of detail about a person's interests and background. What they tweet or post gives us advance information about whether we would find connecting with someone useful or not.

So social networking, and the ability to use it effectively is a key skill for the scholar to acquire right now. If used properly, social media can provide rich social and intellectual rewards. Those who fail to network effectively may struggle to succeed in a pressurised education world.

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