Learning Across Sites: New tools, infrastructures and practices - Earli

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Weaving the context of digital literacy 307
classroom. All this weaves together when studying digital literacy as social practice
and the pedagogical use of ICT in schools.
As shown above, the major challenges for the schools in the PILOT project
were related to how they dealt with changes in the contextual constraints when
ICT was implemented and used in the school practice. This project illustrates the
importance of seeing these constraints on different levels within the school community
in order to establish new literacy practices by using digital technologies.
In this way we need to abandon the notion of literacy as a set of disembodied
skills, and to recognize that literacies are always inevitably situated within specific
practices and specific social contexts, what some educationalists term a social theory
of media literacy (Street, 1984; Buckingham, 2003).
Literacy and citizenship in the digital age
I have used activity theory and different levels at which activities can be analysed
as an approach to studying digital literacy as something more than a specific set of
skills. This approach was then related to different aspects of context as important for
studying digital literacy in schools. In addition, ‘mediated action’ and mastery and
appropriation were used as a way of stating the connection between technological
development and issues of literacies in the way people use the technology.
There is a real danger today that both policy- makers and research initiatives see
‘digital literacy’ as just being able to use the technology in school- based learning,
as shown by different initiatives of developing standards for digital literacy. If using
computers in schools is just seen as a skill and cognitive tool, the appropriation of
how such tools can enhance learning will not be taken up by the students. I see
activity theory as a theoretical framework for expanding our conceptual understanding
of such literacies. These theoretical perspectives will allow us to develop a
multilevel approach, combining institutional effects and theories of mind (Olson,
2003), to ‘digital literacy’ as part of school- based learning.
The social and cultural developments we experience today point to the importance
of digital literacy as a social practice with huge implications for being considered
a citizen in the digital society, with its emphasis on information, knowledge and
networks. As Gunter Kress (2003) has pointed out, the development of media
technologies affects what new kinds of literacies may be developing, and what types
of meanings, cultural effects and transformations they will produce, as well as the
question of the likely distribution of access to or exclusion from these literacies.
Within educational settings it is print that traditionally has been at the centre of
knowledge- production, and literacy has often been conceived as a collection of
culturally independent cognitive skills. Learning to read and write was associated
with a particular kind of cognitive development, through which people became
more logical, analytical, rational and ‘civilized’. One unfortunate consequence is
drawing a distinction between the literate and the illiterate, and between the media
and education as competitors in the reproduction of culture and the formation of
social and cultural subjects.