Diving deep into digital literacy: emerging methods for research

Abstract

Literacy studies approaches have tended to adopt a position which enables ethnographic explorations of a wide range of 'literacies'. An important issue arising is the new challenge required for researchers to capture, manage, and analyse data that highlight the unique character of practices around texts in digital environments. Such inquiries, we argue, require multiple elements of data to be captured and analysed as part of effective literacy ethnographies. These include such things as the unfolding of digital texts, the activities around them, and features of the surrounding social and material environment. This paper addresses these methodological issues drawing from three educationally focused studies, and reporting their experiences and insights within uniquely different contexts. We deal with the issue of adopting new digital methods for literacy research through the notion of a 'deep dive' to explore educational tasks in classrooms. Through a discussion of how we approached the capture and analysis of our data, we present methods to better understand digital literacies in education. We then outline challenges posed by our methods, how they can be used more broadly for researching interaction in digital environments, and how they augment transdisciplinary debates and trends in research methods.

Cooperative Collaboration in the Hybrid Space of Google Docs Based Group Work

“…Due to the emergence of new, digital classroom ecologies, it becomes important to detail how pupils' "interactions and literacy practices are increasingly played out in digital environments" [26]. Thus, collecting data in the physical as well as virtual space makes it possible to pay "attention to the whole ecology" [3] of the group work settings. Hence, after the initial observations and informal teacher interviews were performed in two first year classes it was decided to collect video ethnographic data on group work involving two kinds of sources: a video camera recorded the groups situated around a table capturing their social interactions ( Figure 1), and individual screen-recordings captured activity on the laptops.…”

“…However, empirical evidence of the impact on online collaborative work is yet inadequate" [2]. This paper hopes to contribute to this area with empirical findings from a video ethnographic case study paying "attention to the whole ecology" [3] of a group work session using Google Docs at a Danish upper secondary school.…”

Youth and Digital Citizenship+ (Plus): Understanding Skills for a Digital World

“…Throughout the framework, the focus is on the importance of situational embedding -that is, using digital technologies according to one's specific context. Martin and Grudziecki's (2006) three levels of digital literacy may be illustrated, respectively, through the following paradigms: 1) web-focused digital literacy (e.g., Mozilla's (2016) web literacy model); 2) digital literacy that explores how teachers and/or students engage with digital technologies in specific social contexts (e.g., Bhatt, Roock, and Adams' (2015) work on capturing and analyzing data that examines engagement with digital texts in the classroom); and 3) curation practices related to digital literacy (e.g., Mihailidis, 2015). Per the third paradigm, for example, in the context of digital literacy, Mihailidis 15 (2015) focuses on digital curation and how curation practices may help cultivate digital literacy skills that are creative and user-driven.…”

Digital literacy - a qualitative systematic review

“…Unlike the intrapersonal perspective, papers within this end of the horizontal axis tend to exploratively investigate digital literacy practices, often by using qualitative methods such as observations or other ethnographic approaches (see e.g. Casey & Bruce, 2011;Bhatt, de Roock & Adams 2015;Merchant, 2009).…”