{"id":1312,"date":"2012-07-13T15:11:00","date_gmt":"2012-07-13T15:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk\/?p=1312"},"modified":"2012-07-16T08:00:35","modified_gmt":"2012-07-16T08:00:35","slug":"analysing-digital-literacies-four-headlines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/2012\/07\/13\/analysing-digital-literacies-four-headlines\/","title":{"rendered":"Analysing digital literacies \u2013 four headlines"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the recent activities of the Visitors and Residents project<\/a> has been the development of an analysis framework to help us to gain a deeper understanding of how our participants are engaging with technology for their learning. During the process of coding our interviews we noted down recurrent underlying themes and used these as headlines for the framework. We query the data in NVivo using our original coding e.g. \u201c(ANY: Social Media, Facebook, Twitter, Blog) AND (ANY: Authority, Relevance, Reliability)\u201d – the results are then mapped into the framework which captures the nuances of participants views and motivations.<\/p>\n

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CC – http:\/\/goo.gl\/Ib7eb<\/p><\/div>\n

Getting involved in discussions at a couple of JISC Developing Digital Literacie<\/a>s<\/a> project cluster meetings I found myself using the high-level themes from the framework to respond to reporting from the projects. I was tentative about this as the framework is still evolving but the feedback from the cluster meetings was positive so I promised to make the high-level themes available as a reference point to help structure evaluation and\/or dissemination. What follows is a brief review of the four top-level themes in our framework:<\/p>\n

1. Genres of participation<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is the overarching perspective with Visitor (web perceived as a collection of tools) and Resident (web perceived as a series of co-present spaces) as the principle genres placed at either end of a continuum of engagement (see our First Monday paper<\/a>). With regard to digital literacies it\u2019s possible to equate the \u2018skills\u2019 based (learning the essential functionality of technology) approaches with Visitor and the more experiential\/personal-professional identity approaches with Resident. Of course there is no hard-line between these genres of participation, for example many of our participants use social media only for organisational purposes. They are using an apparently Resident technology in a purely functional, Visitor manner. Having said that for reporting or evaluation it\u2019s often useful to initially separate skills based approaches from experiential approaches as measuring their \u2018impact\u2019 requires different methods.<\/p>\n

2. Attitudes<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the Visitors and Residents project we are exploring \u2018motivation to engage\u2019. Often the participant\u2019s motivation is influenced by an underlying attitude or ideology. This can be as simple as not trusting \u2018crowd sourced\u2019 resources or as complex as their views on what \u2018learning\u2019 is or should be. For the most part these attitudes will not have been closely considered or deconstructed by participants and in some cases simply boil down to forms of prejudice. Good examples of areas which can be highly attitudinal and effect motivations to engage are:<\/p>\n