Fostering Digital Literacy through Web-based Collaborative Inquiry Learning – A Case Study

Abstract

Digital literacy (DL), a term that emerged with the explosion of digital information and multimedia technology, refers to basic competence in using digital technology. The present study first analyzed the evolvement from media literacy to digital literacy and developed a four-branch theoretical framework of DL by investigating related definitions of it. For the purpose of fostering DL, a set of web-based collaborative inquiry learning (WCIL) activities was designed and were implemented on weblog to further the DL of secondary 3 students (aged 14 to 15). To provide students with the necessary support and facilitate their progress, eight fortnightly lessons of one to one and a half hours each were arranged, at which students were asked to report/present the latest progress of their WCIL project, and their teacher gave suggestions and offered the students resources to deal with the problems they had encountered.The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of the WCIL activities on student DL levels and the problems that might be encountered by students and teachers in carrying out the activities. Data were collected from a variety of sources, including lesson observations, focus group interviews, and student weblog postings.The findings show that (1) the WCIL activities were useful in involving students in DL practices and improved student DL levels across a wide variety of indicators, and (2) problems in the implementation of the WCIL activities included inexperience in collaborative inquiry learning, insufficient leadership skills of group leaders, and inadequate DL, which was mainly embodied as the difficulties that the students had in analyzing and synthesizing inquiry materials and improving the level of their accuracy in accessing information.In addition to their development in DL, students also reported social benefits obtained through WCIL, which was embodied as their improvement in collaborative ability, interpersonal skills, leadership skills, articulacy, ability to adapt, judgment, and the courage to carry out interviews and surveys with strangers. Given these benefits, this study only represents a single case, and thus the findings may not be replicable in other educational settings. Further studies are needed to clarify the effect of WCIL on student DL.

Students' group work strategies in source‐based writing assignments

“…The problems related to the lack of leadership in the group (Fu & Pow, ; Pauli et al., ; van Aalst et al., ) did not arise as a real issue in our data. Each group had a leader who was responsible for reporting work done at some points in the project.…”

“…The teacher did not allocate specified roles for group members but it turned out that in the actively collaborating groups one of the members had taken on leadership status. In a similar study Hong Kong, Fu and Pow () found that all groups showing active collaboration had a recognized leader. The reverse did not hold: Some recognized leaders failed to activate other members to collaborate and had to make most of the work alone.…”

“…In realistic classroom assignments, the gains of collaboration have not been self‐evident (Hancock, ; Meyers, ). Many factors affect student teams' collaboration intensity such as teacher interventions (Kuiper et al., ), and team relations, for example, leadership (Fu & Pow, ; van Aalst et al., ). At higher levels of education, students seem to use more elaborate forms of cooperation and collaboration (Hyldegård, ; Saleh & Large, ).…”

Developing Digital Literacy through Collaborative Inquiry Learning in the Web 2.0 Environment – An Exploration of Implementing Strategy

“…The increasing importance of digital media and technology in daily life has resulted in steady evolution of people's understanding of the concept of DL. Consequently, research about DL and DL education has received much attention in recent years (Erstad, 2007;Fu & Pow, 2011).…”

“…Hence, for students to acquire a set of knowledge, skills, and attitudes to cope with the demands of today's knowledge society, "a learning process is needed that is focused on the activities that the students carry out and on the skills they acquire while performing them, rather than on the content itself" (Guitert & Romeu, 2009, p. 3). This study starts with problems and difficulties identified in a published case study of WCIL learning (Fu & Pow, 2011), explores the possible measures to deal with these problems and difficulties for full exertion of the effect of WCIL in developing students' DL, and sums these measures into a preliminary implementation strategy model.…”