The history of Digital Literacy is relatively short, as the phase began to be applied from the 1990s. The concept of digital literacy was developed from information literacy and computer literacy, and with the development of digital technology, especially the usage of Internet, the theme of digital literacy was broadened. However, how can we understand digital literacy today and how could we test one's digital literacy ability seem to be important issues, as computers have been use widely and it seems that everybody is digital iterated, but the fact shows that a large number of computer and Internet users are not really qualified of being ICT iterated. Thus a ICT framework came into being.
There is no doubt that it's a well organized and well written report, as it's easy to understand with very clear structure. However, frankly speaking, I had expected more than I could read from it. When I went through the members of the International ICT Literacy Panel from USA, Brazil, France, Canada and Britain, I was kinda of "wow". Well maybe I seldom read those international reports and I expected too much.
To me the useful information of the report is as follows: 1. The definition of ICT, which makes us know clearly what they are going to talk about. 2. The importance of both cognitive proficiency and technical proficiency in ICT literacy. And these two points are emphasized repeatedly. As for the recommendations, I personally think it's not concrete and practical enough. After reading the report, I talked about it with my roommate, questioning what it was for and how much they spent on it, which actually are not of my business.
So there shuld have been more to be done, by others in future maybe.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
to be honest, when I first read the report from the International ICT Literacy panel, I thought the recommendation of coming up with a standardised test for measuring ICT literacy, was such a good idea. I didnt realise that the Assessment board in coming up with the test item actually had hidden motives as pointed out by Dr Towndrow...potential profit making indeed!!
ReplyDeleteThe framework should still serve its purposes. It would surely lead to huge earnings (the ulterior motive of ETS) but politicians, educators and curriculum makers could still ponder on the findings/insights noted down by the ICT panel.
ReplyDelete