chapter four

Conclusion

The discussion on digital literacy has become a main topic in Switzerland as well as in the rest of Europe. In consequence, Switzerland has been working on a new Curriculum for almost ten years, and the media literacy standards will be published in the second part of 2013. Pedagogic Universities and Schools work on Pilot Projects and experiment on the usage of ICT and digital tools. The European Union on the other side …considers media literacy an extremely important factor for active citizenship in today’s information society…

Large parts of the political class and of society agree that digital alphabetization is necessary. But they do not necessarily agree on what digital literacy means, and less about how to get there. Only on a very abstract level is it possible to find a common ground. Hardly anybody will refused the definition of the four dimensions proposed by Baacke: media critic, media knowledge, media usage and media production, but the pedagogical discussion and practice is far from developing criteria for pilot projects which consider the problems in such a complex way but focused only on aspects of the problem.

As described, the explored pilot projects are not considering this four dimensions but only focusing on one of the following aspects:

• Ict as a complement for the traditional practices (using the ICT as teaching aids)
• ict as a extension of learning/teaching in the virtual space

Forgetting the issue that media literacy includes understanding the background of ICT in its complexity. Generally teachers working on projects, which are based on or supported by ICT, put emphasis in other aspects:

• not using ICT means risks losing the contact with pupils
• using ICT engages and motivates the scholars, facilitating learning

Examples of teaching practices, as far as they are documented, seem to prove this. But in fact it is not a new discovery that scholars are more motivated and engaged when they have an active role in the learning process (Vester).

What is missing in the discussion is to define clearly the areas in which the use of ICT is useful and where its limits are. Many of the explored contributions to the on-line discussion on ICT are rather uncritical and often more like economically motivated propaganda. A whole generation of teachers is self-educated in media literacy without having media literacy standards, which also consider media criticism and  media knowledge and not only media usage and media production.

Traditional literacy is one goal of schools, building on basic requirements learned at home. But this idea cannot be applied to digital literacy since the technology is permanently changing, the gap is rapidly increasing as well between adults and adults as between adults and children and children and children, which means that it is dependent on the background of each family and whether  their members have or not basic digital literacy. To provide a basic common knowledge to reduce those gaps becomes the job of pedagogy, extending digital literacy development to a goal of the whole society.

As important as it is to recognize the efforts of teachers who explore the pedagogical possibilities of ICT, is it equally important to recognize also the necessity of training teachers to be able to use ICT in a constructive way in order to facilitate children’s digital literacy development.