What should be in a digital literacy program?
There are two things that, if included, will prepare a person for success in the world, but if left out, will set them up for a lifetime of struggle.
Neither is difficult to include, but both are all too often neglected.
One is so small, that people object at how time spent on it isn’t showing progress.
The other is so large that it doesn’t fit into our thinking about digital literacy or any other particular place.
Every day, I see the damage from each of these being neglected. In children. In adults. In job seekers. In large organizations. In solo-entrepreneurs. In people around me. In myself.
Let’s start with the small. I started with computers almost 50 years ago—programming with wires, with paper tape, with punch cards. Fortran. Cobol. C. PDP-11 Assembler. Basic. Lisp.
I read all the right books. I could do the “hard part” of programming. But I didn’t know how to do some “small thing.” I didn’t know the four lines of JCL that would allow my Fortran programs to read files. I didn’t know how to invoke the assembler. I didn’t know how to turn on the keypunch machine. And once I learned these in one place, they weren’t the same elsewhere. These small things were barriers to me. Barriers that slowed me down or entirely stopped me. Twenty-five years later, I was still hitting them. I had one of the first Macs (actually a Lisa), and I turned pale white searching for a command line.
When an elementary school technology class spends the first few weeks learning how to use Google Drive, how to log in, and other “basic things,” parents scream in disappointment because their kids aren’t programming drones or doing something exciting. But, for those kids, everything goes better because they aren’t distracted (perhaps to the point of being lost) when another non-technology class has them use some technical tools. Their less lucky classmates, without this preparation, don’t learn the substance of that later class because they are struggling with this.
There are many adults who learn programming in some wonderfully clever web-based all-in-one instruction tool but fail despite being more than good enough at programming. They didn’t learn how to set up configuration files or use a development environment (e.g., Visual Studio) or a source control system (e.g., git). A recent study of certificate holders from a high online web programming school showed that literally 0% of them could create a simple static website comprising of one heading and one paragraph of text. They lacked a dozen small skills, so they hit roadblock after roadblock. It was a wonderful programming class, but other basics were needed, but neglected.
(In contrast, the University of Finland has a very high-quality free sequence of classes, where in addition to programming, they have included all the other small things that people need.)
I can tell an infinite number of stories about people who sound stupid because there are some basic things they don’t know. For example, I met a man who had been using Excel every workday for twenty years and didn’t know it could do math. He was using an adding machine to get totals. But they aren’t stupid. They were ignorant of some small thing that should have been left out of whatever manner they had learned the broader domain. And I can tell almost as large a number of embarrassing personal stories of opportunities that I missed.
And now the large. In ancient times, before chatbots, search engines, or even the Internet, what do you do when you realize there is a “small piece” you don’t know? Perhaps the public library or a local college bookstore might help you. Perhaps not. In my experience, generally not. You had to ask a human. You had to find a human to ask. You had not to be embarrassed to ask. As you got older, it was easier to find the right human and harder to not be embarrassed.
In innumerable ways, my life would have gone better had I more often asked when I didn’t know. Probably, the majority of the more serious problems in my life could have been avoided had I been able to ask a question.
Digital literacy should include how to find answers online. Search engines. Chatbots. Discussion groups. Video channels. And more.
And how to evaluate those answers.
And what to do when you can’t find the answers online. How to realize that you won’t find answers online at all or at least without help.
How to find a human. How to ask a human. How to not be embarrassed. And even, how to say thank you.
And if you say that this last part is beyond what we should teach in digital literacy, I will ask, “Where else will I teach it?”
What was missing from your digital literacy education?
What would you most like to see included in k-12 digital literacy?
Would love to hear your ideas, feel encouraged to add them to the comments.
