JCS 2019 | Digital Literacy in Schools: building capabilities

Darryl will be presenting Not letting the technological tail wag the educational dog: the case for a framework of inquiry skills at JCS 2019.

As Marshall McLuhan famously said, “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”

This co-evolution is both inevitable and increasingly problematic – as our technologies converge on the computer, and the computer accelerates their ongoing development, so the risk of these technologies becoming ends in themselves rather than means to human ends increases.

This creates several challenges for schools, which include but are not limited to vision and strategy, initial and ongoing costs, initial and ongoing training for staff and students, and the tension between existing and emerging technologies.

Of particular interest and relevance to the themes of the Conference, and the focus of this talk, is the tension between existing and emerging technologies as they relate to skills. Given the rate of technological change, it is understandable that emerging technologies are determining the skills that need to be taught. However, this allows the tail to wag the dog.

In this talk Darryl will consider the value of a framework of inquiry skills – central to which are information literacy skills, and a growing number of which are dependent on “digital-age technologies” (Douglas Rushkoff) – to ensuring that the technological tail does not wag the educational dog.