Becoming digitally literate: Reinstating an educational lens to digital skills policies for adults

Abstract

The development of digital skills for all is a key focus of many educational policies across the globe. Despite the significant attention paid to the nature and suitability of such policies targeted at young people, there has been far less focus on digital skills policies targeted at adults. This article contributes to this literature. It outlines current digital skills policy in England. Having established this background, it analyses 30 interviews with digitally competent adults from lower socioeconomic backgrounds about their experiences of learning to use the Internet. In doing so, the article highlights that a narrow and instrumental digital skills agenda is emerging in the education of adults, driven by the needs of the commercial sector, that is in stark contrast to the experiences, motivations and hopes of adults who learn about, and use, digital technologies. Reframing digital skills as part of a broader adult education agenda may offer a way to facilitate the development of digital literacies that individuals seek.

ICT Usage for Cross-Curricular Connections in Music and Visual Arts during Emergency Remote Teaching in Slovenia

“…The lack of in-depth ICT knowledge is evident from the teachers' answers, which show that the ICT skills of most respondents did not exceed the use of basic computer software. According to teachers' statements about the diversity of choice in computer tools and programs, they lacked knowledge of the possibilities that modern ICT offers for creating efficient cross-curricular connections, which is in line with other studies [2,3,10,32]. Bohak Adam and Metljak [33] investigated Slovenian teachers' competences and use of ICT in the field of music during the COVID-19 pandemic.…”

Key factors in digital literacy in learning and education: a systematic literature review using text mining

“…Among the selected articles in our review, several highlight the importance of teaching digital skills (Peláez et al, 2020) and propose specific programs to developing (critical) digital literacy pedagogies (Alt & Raichel, 2020;Campbell & Kapp, 2020;Handley, 2018;Knight et al, 2020). Other studies highlight that pupils (Pérez-Escoda et al, 2016), students (Al Seghayer, 2020) but also adults and teachers (Eynon, 2020;Martín et al, 2020;Sillat et al, 2017) need support to use digital tools, while Bergdahl et al (2020) suggest that digital skills are related to students' engagement in (technology-enhanced) learning and learning outcomes (Pagani et al, 2016). This factor not only highlights the importance of digital literacy and the fuzziness surrounding the terminology, but further emphasizes the acquisition of such competence in an educational context.…”

Sorting Machines: Digital Technology and Categorical Inequality in Education

“…But a critique of this work is the implicit assumption that developing digital skills directly leads to good grades or a job. It ignores how digital use is constructed within school structures and whether teachers even recognize these uses as helpful or not (Eynon, 2021; Rafalow, 2018). In focusing on teachers’ instructional uses of digital technology, we suggest that education researchers can examine how students and instructive technologies are categorized and matched to one another in unequal ways.…”