Digital and Critical Literacy

This video is about the critical literacy that how the information on the internet could be deceiving sometimes. Like this video which is actually a hoax video and when it was shown to students; majority of the students believed that it is a reliable one and they could use it for their research. Hence it is important for teachers to educate their students about checking the reliability of any website before they use it for the academic purposes.

Definition of New Literacies

New literacies is a shift from 'showing' to 'sharing' of information. Hence a collective knowledge can be build up through sharing blogs, online discussions and community based wikis (Callow, 2008). Knobel and Lankshear (2006) define new literacies as constituted by ‘technical stuff’ and ‘ethos stuff’. Technical stuff is digitality; for example programmers write source codes to drive different kinds of applications (text, images, sound, animations, etc.) on digital electronic apparatuses (computers, games hardware, CD, etc.). Ethos stuff is about kinds of mindset. One mindset describes the contemporary world as much being the same as 200-300 years before just a bit more ‘technologized’. While the other mindset sees the world has been changed significantly as it is working on a different approach and recognizes the cyberspace as a fact of the new world. Hence new literacies are defined by the second mindset who believes that cyberspace operates on the basis of different assumptions and values than from the physical space (Knobel and Lankshear, 2006).