Free course on Digital Literacy: the Digital Literacy Lab for Educators in Global Perspective
Pandemic or no pandemic, our irreversible reliance on digital technologies has elevated the importance of developing critical digital literacy skills around the world. The shared global experience of the challenges and opportunities we face with digital technologies meanwhile makes it essential to place critical digital literacy development into a global perspective.
In 2021, to become critically digitally literate means to consider our interactions, behaviours, and consumption patterns online, as well as how we use digital technologies to create and share new ideas and artefacts. To develop ‘2021-relevant’ critical digital literacy globally requires urgent courses of CPD for educators to ensure this essential ‘C21st skill’ is nurtured in young people.
This is the gap that The Digital Literacy Lab for Educators: a Global Perspective MOOC, commissioned by The 3CL Foundation and created by Dr Emma Pauncefort, Learning Sciences Practitioner and Founder of UK-based education consultancy, Dilectae, is seeking to fill.
Following a highly successful first iteration of the programme in autumn 2020 with c.2,000 learners, the course is being run again from 28 April, now complemented by material co-created with colleagues in Sri Lanka, Nigeria and Kenya.
The programme offers an essential course of personal and professional development for educators, learners and anyone interested in re-evaluating their civic engagement with our digital world. At the centre of this course is ‘netizenship’, a concept coined by Michael Hauben to define the internet user as a positive contributor online and here coupled with emerging frameworks that explore digital wellbeing. The course considers how our digital world has reimagined conventional media, and it scrutinises the opportunities and challenges of online content creation and consumption made possible through these new forms of media. This critical review is accompanied by strategies to guide our activity and help us to behave civically online, that is as ‘netizens’, for the good of society as well as ourselves.
The overarching aim of the course is to empower educator and learner alike with a ‘2021-revelant’ critical digital literacy toolkit. It is hoped that the knowledge and skills participants acquire through the course will be shared with their personal and professional communities as they become more active local champions of digital literacy for a better online world for all.
To hear more about the importance of digital literacy in a global perspective see: http://bit.ly/ZambiaDLLE
To enrol head here: http://bit.ly/DLLEspring21
