- My digital profile
I would believe this actually really describes me as i’m not specially talented or ‘confident’ in digital platforms. Yet what I’m sure of is that teaching and learning are my strong points -which I’m proud of- as I’m always open to learning and can always find a way to explain something I know to someone else.
Not to seem greedy but i wish that by the end of the course I could reach this confidence level in all categories.
2. Part 2 of assignment
Defining digital literacy
Throughout questions 1 and 2 of this assignment, I realized that the first link (wikipedia) would be quite useful in beginning a project. It gave a vague understanding of the concept. The presenting paragraph, I believe, is clear enough for a ‘description’. Yet it is not a source from which I could get a clear and concise definition of ‘Digital literacy’. When I clicked on the tab definition, I found a definition of the digital divide which is absolutely not ‘digital literacy’. I also tried scanning the hashtag #diglit but no clear definition yet.
After some google searches I would answer the question Literacy is the ability to read and write. Hence, digital literacy, base on my google search was “the ability to find, evaluate, utilize, share, and create content using information technologies and the Internet.” This information is based on research done in Cornell University. Doctor Belshaw would say that one of the elements of digital literacy education is to provide the ability to ‘choose appropriate images, recognize copyright licensing, and cite or get permissions’. This, I believe, is one of the two most important elements of digital literacy especially in the context of Egypt as poor people from the Egyptian suburbs are not educated around digital literacy which would lead these future adults to grow up with the disability to cope with the emerging digital literacy world.
The second most important element of digital literacy, in my opinion, is the ability to ‘find’ data digitally. People could find jobs, find houses, cars, the correct information they are looking for about a certain disease, if they knew how to use digital literacy as it is way vaster.
The optimal situation for Egypt (again, in my opinion) is digital fluency which is a combination of both digital literacy ad digital skills. It is to be flexible, accurate, efficient with digital technologies and technological systems. Question 7 shows us that without digital fluency one could attain false information such as with google which is not peer reviewed.
Also, digital skills are the skills we have in the different tasks we encounter with the digital world. In other words, it could be considered the first step in reaching digital fluency – the middle step being digital literacy-. ‘Yet the term is so broad that some experts even stay away from it’. In other words digital skills would be the ability one has to understand and use technologies.
Dr. Bali, concerning your video, I would like to say I had never thought of digital literacy as the mechanics of a car. I must say it’s a very interesting metaphor!
NOTE : the underlined sentences are links to websites i used to get the information.
I also used this website .
Karim Habashi's Blog 