CHALLENGES TO DIGITAL LITERACY EDUCATION
TITLE
LEARNING OBJECTIVES:
At the end of the lesson, students may able to:
1. Develop a working understanding in challenges to digital literacy education
2. Appreciate the importance of Digital Literacy Education
3. Realize that challenges must be taken to develop a better future.
CONTENT
Digital Literacy Education shares many of the same challenges to Media Literacy
for example: How should it be taught? How can it be measured and evaluated? Should it
be taught for the protection of students in their consumption of information or should it be
to develop their appreciation for digital media?
There is no single and comprehensive plan anywhere for teaching digital literacy
the way it should be taught (Brown, 2017). Accordingly, he asked, “What assumptions,
theories, and research evidence underpin specific frameworks? Whose interests are
being served when particular frameworks are being promoted?
Beyond efforts to produce flashy and visually attractive models how might we
reimagine digital literacies to promote critical mindsets and active citizenry in order to
reshape our societies for new ways of living, learning, and working for a better future-for
all?”
Despite the challenges posed by the broad and fluid nature of media and therefore
digital literacy, educators in the Philippines can spearhead literacy efforts by doublingdown on those concept and principles of Media Literacy that are of utmost importance,
namely, critical thinking and the grounding of critical thought in a moral framework.
1. Teach media and digital literacy integrally.
Any attempt to teach these principles must first realize that they cannot be
separated from context-meaning, they cannot be taught separately from the topics.
Critical Thinking requires something other than itself to think, critically about, and thus
cannot develop in a vacuum. Similarly, developing a moral framework within students
cannot be taught via merely talking about it. This moral framework develops by practicing
it, that is, basing our decisions on it, in the context of everything else we do in our day-today lives.
2. Master your subject matter.
Whatever it is you teach, you must not only possess a thorough understanding of
your subject matter, you must also understand why you are teaching it, and why it is
important to learn
3. Think “multi-disciplinary.”
How can educators integrate media and digital literacy in a subject as abstract as
Mathematics, for example? The answer lies in stepping-out of the “pure mathematics”
mindset and embracing communication as being just as important to math as
computation. Once communication is accepted as important, this opens-up new venues
where the new literacies can be exercised.
4. Explore motivations, not just messages.
While it is very important that students learn what is the message being
communicated by any media text, it is also important to develop in them a habit for asking
why is the message being communicated in the first place.
5. `Leverage skills that students already have.
It is always surprising how much a person can do when they are personally and
affectively motivated to do so-in other words, a person can do amazing things when they
really want to. Harnessing this natural desire to explore whatever interests them will go a
long way in improving media and digital literacy education in your classroom.
ASSESSMENT
I. TRUE OR FALSE
Direction: Write T if the statement is true and F if the statement is false in space provided.
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