digital literacies – Page 2

ASS up your videos

Sue Watling / November 29, 2014 / digital inclusion, digital literacies, Multimedia

Now Youtube is owned by Google, there’s been a rethink about transcripts. Google uses the text from text alternatives in their search technology resulting in a new interest in ensuring inclusive practice. Only they don’t call it this – nor do they use the word accessibility – this is about being searchable and sharable. Put them together with accessibility and what have you got? that’s right – ASS.

YouTube/Google’s automatically generated captions are gibberish. The times when they make a weird sort of sense are often insulting or rude. The database is clearly not censored. Captioning companies claim increased viewing (thereby selling) figures to persuade us textual equivalents are worthwhile investments. Not only for the hearing impaired (and presumably anyone without the necessary access to headphones, speakers etc) subtitles and closed captions have the potential to open up your content to larger audiences, including speakers of other languages. Here is another example of inclusive design arriving through the back door. But so long as it arrives…

It isn’t clear how much google are investing in speech to text technology; they probably own all the captioning companies anyway. For now the onus is on the video producer to ensure their content is ASS – Accessible, Searchable and Sharable. Browser diversity makes it a challenge to provide one size fits all guidance but here are my seven steps to ASS up your video content in YouTube.

1. In the Creator Studio (under the profile menu top right of the YouTube screen) select Edit on the video to be captioned.

YOUTUBE edit video

2. Select Subtitles and CC from the top navigation bar. The first time you edit a video you’ll be asked to set video language.

YOUTUBE set language

3. Choose English (United Kingdom). I found English Automatic offers caption boxes but not the menu with the transcripts options.

YOUTUBE English United Kingdom

4. Click the English (United Kingdom) button to open the menu and select Transcribe and set timings.

YOUTUBE transcripts buttons

5. Two choices – either play the video and type – the option at the bottom to pause video while typing is a useful tool – or copy and paste text directly in from a text file. Either way, when complete, click the Set Timings button.

YOUTUBE transcripts box

6. It looks like setting the timings goes on forever but after a few minutes, click on the English (United Kingdom) box again.

YOUTUBE setting timings

7. This reopens the caption boxes with the text in them. Here you can check and edit. Click the Publish button to complete the task. YOUTUBE showing captions

There are other ways to add text; you can upload a transcript file but it needs to be saved as a text file first and there are formatting rules to follow. I tried typing in captions as the video played but lost them a couple of times when saving. In places YouTube seems to conflate captions, subtitles and transcripts which can be confusing initially but the 7 steps above, where you use the Transcript and set timings options to import text as captions/subtitles, worked well for me. The Set Timings function appears reliable although browser settings might create some small differences in following this guidance.

There you go – ASS up your videos today!

Digging digital dirt; the times they are a changing…

Sue Watling / October 4, 2014 / digital exclusion, digital inclusion, digital literacies, EDEU, social impact of the Internet, Teaching and Learning in a Digital Age (TELEDA)

Sshhh….don’t say it loud but accessibility is a dirty word. No one wants to talk about it. The subject of inclusive digital resources raises eyebrows and elicits sighs. The unspoken thought ‘here she goes again’ hangs palpably in the air.

This week I’ve been digging the digital dirt. Issues are coming to the surface, into the light and do you know what? People are listening. Something has changed. The time might have come. IT Matters. Let’s talk digital.

Information Technology enables participation. Digital data has the edge over printed text. It’s uniquely flexible; size, shape, colour and contrast can all be changed. The alchemy of text-to-speech and speech-to-text is a modern miracle. There’s no technical reason why anyone should not be able to access digital means of information and communication. Barriers to access are socially constructed. The early web pioneers knew this:

‘… it is critical that the web be usable by anyone regardless of individual capabilities and disabilities.’ (Berners Lee, 1997)

‘…if we succeed making web accessibility the norm rather than the exception, this will benefit not only the disability community but the entire population.’ (Dardailler, 1997)

The damage caused to digital democracy by Microsoft’s Graphical User Interface (GUI) and hand-operated mouse has disenfranchised millions. Attention to inclusion hasn’t kept up. When the platforms of the public sphere are digital, without the means of participation you are excluded. I know because it happened to me. I have Uvietis; a genetic condition with treatment which involves blurred vision. This is how I learned about inaccessibility and became involved with a local organisation for people with sight loss. Dodgy eyes showed me the reality of digital exclusion, and the sadness of realising although there are a few who really care, too few is not enough to make a difference.

Digital divides are complex and multi-layered. They cross all social strata but concentrate where disempowerment already exists. Evidence suggests if you are socially excluded you are most likely to be digitally excluded as well. This is a uniquely 21st century discrimination but like all opportunities for social change, the bare bones are already there, waiting for the catalyst to give them shape. Drivers for change can arrive unexpectedly. Here are some of the conversations going on at Lincoln which might just make change happen:

Government changes in the DSA (Disabled Students Allowance); teaching resources will need to be reviewed to ensure they fill gaps created by loss of funds for technology to support learning.
Internationalisation; language barriers can be reduced by providing teaching materials online, in particular lecture content which can be revisited and revised.
Flipping the classroom; providing lecture content for students to access online and using contact time for more interactive teaching activities, supports inspirational teaching and the student engagement agenda.
Digitisation; not always fully accessible and raising awareness of restrictions imposed by Publishers is creating interest in how other Libraries are dealing with this.
EDEU; the new unit’s plans for integrating digital confidence and capabilities into Teacher Education and CPD programmes calls for a framework which can and should be inclusive in design and delivery.
Blackboard; plans for introducing baseline templates (e.g. Starter, Intermediate and aspirational Gold) could and should include attention to accessibility.
Corporate Identity; opportunity for UL to become known as a digitally confident and inclusive university.

There is more. This summer I coordinated institutional wide responses to the UCISA Digital Capabilities survey which reinforced – like the UCISA 2014 report on Technology Enhanced Learning – lack of time and resources as the key barrier to developing digital practice.

This is where EDEU can help. EDEU has a new educational development and enhancement team By the end of the year there will be six of us to talk to about digital divides and exclusions. We can scaffold and support; help with developing alternative formats for multimedia and ensure accessible text and images. Get in touch. Let us know you’re interested in using virtual learning environments to enhance your teaching. We are EDEU and inclusion is our middle name.

I’ve been digging in the digital dirt and coming up with clean hands. It feels good to have people listening. The times they are a changing – indeed.

Berners Lee, T (1997)World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Launches Web Accessibility Initiative. WAI press release 7 April 1997. www.w3.org/Press/WAI-Launch.html

(Dardailler, D 1997 Telematics Applications Programme TIDE Proposal. Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) http://www.w3.org

Scientists sneak Bob Dylan lyrics into articles as part of long-running bet http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/sep/29/swedish-cientists-bet-bob-dylan-lyrics-research-papers

social media selfies from #BBWorld14 – the moral of storify is think before you link!

Sue Watling / July 25, 2014 / #BbWorld14, digital literacies

Twitter is the ultimate in contagious self-promotion. With over 2500 delegates at #Bbworld14 it was a challenge to stand out from the crowd. Social media is one of the few ways to achieve a permanent ‘presence’. In every session I attended the majority were heads down working on a mobile device. I understand this. Apart from the ease of making digital notes, the tweeting motivation was strong. You don’t travel all that distance to be invisible.

There are multiple layers to social media as well as a multitude of options and #BBworld14 made good use of them, as you would expect. Even the Twitter Wall was huge!

In the world of social media your audience is often singular and cen be seen in the mirror. My Twitter stats from the event might be derisable to some, but for me they’re now a challenge to emulate!

BBWorld14 Twitter Stats

This tweet was picked up by one of the Storify collections which inspired me to make my own very first Storify Story using tweets and photos from the event. I was impressed with the ease of the software. It does all the work for you and easily brings together any content with your name on across a whole range of social media. I linked it to Twitter and Fickr to produce a useful reminder of the event.

Storify at BBWorld

Lastly, I became 4130th person to be followed by @Blackboard! 🙂

BBWorld blog mention

Our digital identity is integral to digital literacies. Social media platforms make it easy for mistakes and the permanent nature of digital footprints mean errors made in haste can truly be repented at leisure. Whether Google will agree to taking down something you later regret is another issue but for the majority of people ‘think before you link‘ is essential. Sometimes it’s less about your own actions and more about the social media actions of others. Storify listed everyone who appeared in my #BbWorld14 story with an option to contact them and it was surprising how many faces showed up which I’d forgotten I’d included in tweets. Not all social media does this. Maybe they should.

Talk to the duck. It works every time!

Sue Watling / July 4, 2014 / digital literacies, Teaching and Learning in a Digital Age (TELEDA)

Last month I wrote about social media and the question of blogging has continued to call for answers. Why blog? What’s a rubber dock got to do with it? A comment on the post Imagine Baudrillard on Twitter suggests blogs may soon be old news – too long too boring 🙁 This was food for thought on the haul up and down the A15. Commuting is a great place for head space.

I’m MOOCing again. This time it’s e-leaning ecologies with Coursera. Dipping in and out with curiosity, looking for ideas for TELEDA and swapping notes with other e-learners interested in e-teaching. It strikes me how similar the resources promoting the benefits of educational technology are to those written over a decade ago, like Diana Laurillard’s Rethinking University Teaching (2001) or Garrison and Anderson’s e-learning in the 21st century (2003). I’ve just read an article by Graham Rogers on the use of technology in History written in 2004. Cited by Sage* as the second most read article in 2006, it could have been written today. Maybe blogs have some answers to promoting shifts to virtual practice.

The blog derives from web-log – lists of ‘interesting’ websites for sharing. It supports reflection. What did I do, how did I do it, what did I learn? Blogging helps make individual thought processes visible. A bit like having a mirror on the internet; one which surfaces your reflections on connections between new and existing ideas. Known as deeper approaches to learning, the process can reveal new ways of seeing – the ‘I get it’ moment which is meaningful on an individual level. While early adopters were making claims for the promise of technology to harness more effective ways of learning, they were heralding the potential of virtual space for what the Coursera MOOC has introduced as collaborative/reflexive rather than didactic/mimetic education. What has the duck got to do with it?

Rubber ducking is the epitome of blogging. It works like this. You have a problem. You ask a question. As you’re talking the answer comes to you so rather than constantly revealing what you don’t know or have forgotten to colleagues, you talk to your duck instead. The phenomena belongs to the process of debugging programme code and demonstrates the magic of verbalisation. The mind gets crowded. Sometimes you have to extract the problem from its cognitive space and put it into reality. In doing so the answer becomes clear and the duck never laughs at you.

Blogging is like rubber ducking. It’s a place for cognitive extraction. The process of fine tuning edits the superfluous to reveal core insights. It’s also about writing discipline. Set a word count and get your point across in x words or less. Or ramble in a text document then extract key issues. Blogging can be a powerful tool for introducing virtual spaces, supporting interaction and demonstrating evidence of learning – good for building digital literacies too. I hope blogging stays. It’s got a lot to offer. Honestly, talk to the duck. It works every time 🙂

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* http://alh.sagepub.com/reports/mfr7.dtl

References

Garrison, R. and Anderson, T. (2003) E-learning in the 21st Century: A Framework for Research and Practice. Psychology Pess.

Laurillard, D. (2001) Rethinking University Teaching: A Conversational Framework for the Effective Use of Learning Technologies. London: Routledge

Rogers, G. (2004) History, learning technology and student achievement: Making the difference? In Active Learning in Higher Education Nov 01, 2004 5: 232-247

Talking Xerte pictures; should we cite, steal or DIY?

Sue Watling / June 27, 2014August 5, 2015 / digital literacies, Teaching and Learning in a Digital Age (TELEDA), Xerte

I’m guilty of image theft. Digital images in general and this baby one in particular. Gimmicky I know but illustrative of the social impact of the internet; in particular on digital literacies and education. I cite a url to show I’m not claiming ownership but frustratingly, this might not be enough. The protection offered through the concept of fair use is not as much as we might think. EDEU futures need to include the C word – shhhh……..copyright.

At the Making Digital Histories ‘Talking Xerte’ workshops this week, it was suggested managing copyright requirements by DIY. Digital technologies make content production feasible and this is an interesting idea. Given time and a heap more creative talent, I’d be happy to adopt a DIY approach but it’s not without challenges and reinforces how guidance on using visuals in teaching resources would be a useful development area for the new EDEU team; maybe we could build a TELEDA or EDEU image bank. Digital pix are fun ways to develop digital literacies staff and students on the Making Digital Histories team can demonstrate.

I attended both ‘Talking Xerte’ workshops with presentations from Sarah Atkinson and Adam Bailey, University of Brighton; Bob Ridge-Stearn, Newman University, Birmingham and David Lewis, University of Leeds* all sharing experiences of students producing learning objects with Xerte – a free tool from the University of Nottingham. We talked Xerte, used Xerte and had lunch. A perfect model for any practical professional development event aimed at enhancing digital literacies and knowledge 🙂

Xerte is a resource which brings digital content together. Text, images, multimedia and hyperlinks can be inserted into pre-designed Xerte template pages. It isn’t arguably the most exciting of environments but like Blackboard, Xerte is about active learning; using tools to generate interaction with content and facilitate learning opportunities.

Xerte is free. At Lincoln it lives at http://xerte.lncd.lincoln.ac.uk Sign in with network name and password; examples and help resources on the login page. As with all things digital there’s a learning curve but once colleagues had a go, getting their hands Xerte (sorry, couldn’t resist!) they all saw potential.

The example below is one I put together to demonstrate different template page styles. It’s part information and part guidance on using Xerte. Quick tip – the size can be customised in the embed code. Direct link https://xerte.lncd.lincoln.ac.uk/play.php?template_id=2267

Xerte is a great tool for developing and enhancing digital literacies. It ticks all the essential skills identified by SCONUL in their digital lens for information literacies. Identify, Scope, Plan, Gather, Evaluate, Manage and Present digital information http://www.sconul.ac.uk/publication/digital-literacy-lens A key message from last week’s Festival of Teaching and Learning was to have a list of supported software for generating teaching resources. My suggestion is Xerte has an evidence-based and well deserved place on it.

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* All projects funded through HEA/JISC Digital Literacies in the Disciplines.

baby with ipad image from http://proservicescorp.com/wp-content/uploads/ipad_baby.jpg

DSA changes; Oh Mr Willetts, what have you done?

Sue Watling / June 13, 2014 / digital inclusion, digital literacies, equality and diversity, social impact of the Internet, Teaching and Learning in a Digital Age (TELEDA), Virtual Learning Environment

In April Mr Willetts announced on changes to the Disabled Students Allowance. Claiming these will ‘modernise’ the system, he calls HEIs to pay ‘…greater consideration to the delivery of their courses and how to provide support’ which should include ‘…different ways of delivering courses and information.’ The definition of disability in the Equality Act 2010 will be the new guideline for access to DSA. This states you are only ‘disabled’ if you have a physical or mental impairment that has a ‘substantial’ and ‘long-term’ negative effect on your ability to do normal daily activities.

At the present time, DSA is awarded to a broad list of criteria including students diagnosed with dyslexia. Support for these students is being withdrawn. Reasons cited include ‘technological advances’ and ‘increases in use of technology’. Clever technology!

What Mr Willets is describing is inclusive practice. Taking advantage of the flexibility of digital information to be customised to suit user preference i.e. adjusting font shape and size, altering colour contrasts, listening to content read out loud and providing transcripts or textual alternatives to all forms of multi media. Institutions are being asked to ‘…play their role in supporting students with mild difficulties, as part of their duties to provide reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act.’ In other words. taking personal responsibility for providing accessible content.

If it were as easy as that Mr Willets, it would already be happening.

Back in 1997, Berners Lee and Daniel Dardailler, internet and www pioneers, had altruistic aims for information democracy. These two quotes are important. We need reminding lest we forget.

“Worldwide, there are more than 750 million people with disabilities. As we move towards a highly connected world it is critical that the web be usable by anyone regardless of individual capabilities and disabilities. The W3C is committed to removing accessibility barriers for all people with disabilities – including the deaf, blind, physically challenged, and cognitive or visually impaired. We plan to work aggressively with government, industry, and community leaders to establish and attain Web accessibility goals.” Berners Lee, T (1997)World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Launches Web Accessibility Initiative. WAI press release 7 April 1997. www.w3.org/Press/WAI-Launch.html

“The users in our project are the Web users with a disability, like visually or hearing impaired people. The needs for these users are to access the information online on the Internet just as everyone else. The impact of this project on the users with disabilities is to give them the same access to information as users without a disability. In addition, if we succeed making web accessibility the norm rather than the exception, this will benefit not only the disability community but the entire population.” (Dardailler, D 1997 Telematics Applications Programme TIDE Proposal. Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) http://www.w3.org/WAI/TIDE/f1.htm

In principle, I understand what Mr Willetts is saying but I doubt we are coming from the same place. I’ve tried to raise awareness of digital inclusion for some time. In practice I believe attitudes like these risk knee-jerk and exclusive reactions. Like lecture capture; sticking a 50 minute recording of a lecture online without content being made available in alternative formats.

Digital engagement mirrors ourselves as individuals. The provision of accessible online resources involves changing behaviours from unintentionally exclusive to inclusive when the affordances of technology are managed by individuals who all interact with it in different ways. The process of developing digital literacies is complex in particular when it comes to inclusive practice. History shows how the principle of ‘reasonable adjustments’ is often seen as the responsibility of someone else. It isn’t going to be as simple as it sounds in this statement.

Barriers to a higher education just multiplied and the principles of widening participation diluted.

Oh Mr Willetts, what have you done?

Get critical, get digital, get EDEU…

Sue Watling / April 12, 2014 / digital literacies, PhD, Teaching and Learning in a Digital Age (TELEDA)

I’ve been looking for supporting materials on critical writing and reflection for Getting Started and they’re not jumping off the page. Like digital literacies, I wonder if competence with these skills and practices are being assumed. Yet conversations suggest support would be useful. As CERD divides and EDEU* begins to form, I’m looking back. Learning development was part of CERD, until Helen Farrell, our Learning Development Coordinator, was an unfortunate loss through redundancy. The work Helen and I did lives on in the [unmaintained] Learning Development@Lincoln website, now evolved into a library lib guide page.

Maybe bringing academic and digital together under a title like ‘Learning Literacies’ is a new way to represent them. I’d like to bring these aspects of learning development into EDEU because I’ve been here before. Digging around in my archives shows how the content is relatively unchanged over the years.

In 2007 I created the Academic Writing Desk. Home page image below.

Here is the Academic Writing Desk home page for Essay Writing.

In 2009 I developed Snapshot specifically for Getting Started. This was designed to introduce new students to academic practice; namely academic writing, reading, thinking and a bit on reflective practice.

Here is the Snapshot page on academic writing

Helen Farrell and I created the Learning Development@Lincoln website. The Writing page is shown below.

These are all different ways of presenting similar information. An interesting insight into life in 2008 is the lack of reference to digital literacies in the Learning Development@Lincoln resources – but this could easily be put right.

EDEU will be new but not so new. Before CERD, we were the Teaching and Learning Development Office with a remit not that dissimilar to EDEU. The difference is how times have changed, how the university and the sector has changed. Internationalisation, social media, online submission, multimedia communication etc. With additional resource the new unit will provide capacity to pick up on some of the learning development aspects of these areas. Time to get critical. Get digital. Get EDEU. Bring it on!

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* EDEU Educational Development and Enhancement Unit

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Staying safe online; the most important digital literacy of all

Sue Watling / April 4, 2014April 4, 2014 / conference, digital literacies, social impact of the Internet, Teaching and Learning in a Digital Age (TELEDA)

This week I rediscovered my feminist roots. Behind Closed Doors was a student led Conference at the University of Lincoln which tackled the subject of domestic abuse. With colleague Jim Rogers, I ran a workshop looking at Digital Danger: the dark side of the net. Jim and I co-authored Social Work in a Digital Society a book examining the impact of the internet on higher education and health and social care professions, in particular those involving social exclusion and disempowerment. For me digital literacies have to include identity and inclusion but now I’m thinking they need another element – awareness of digital abuse.

Preparing the presentation was a consciousness raising experience. So far I’ve escaped serious digital danger but I’ve been lucky. For many, the insidiousness of internet connections offers new tools for exercising power and control. Think before you Tweet is the least of it. Online there are no walls, no doors, no boundaries, nowhere to hide. Text messages, social media statuses, emails, photographs and video are all ways to hurt vulnerable victims, sometimes with fatal consequences. Whatever you call it, cyberbullying, stalking, harassment, it’s when the fun stops and the hating begins.

Stolen identity, threats, blackmail, rumours, abusive comments, inappropriate images – the permutations are endless. Myself and colleagues talk to students about the difference between personal and public online identities but digital abuse frequents private places as much as open ones. In 2011 the Guardian claimed Cyberstalking by strangers was ‘now more common’ than face-to-face stalking but it’s frighteningly common from ex partners – with or without a history of domestic violence.

Digital Stalking: a guide to technology risks for victims by Jennifer Perry is a free publication downloadable from Women’s Aid who have other supporting resources about staying safe online. Twitter and Facebook offer advice about online safety. The Digital Stalking website has a range of free materials to help victims of digital abuse.

The internet is a virtual mirror, reflecting the good, the bad and the ugly. Free from traditional boundaries of time and place, it’s the most powerful communication and information tool ever, with infinite capacity for supporting the darker aspects of human nature. What it means to be digitally literate should encompass the affordance for evil every bit as much as the positives. Staying safe online is fast becoming the most important literacy of all.

Will virtual badgery catch on? The art has a long way to go for linguistic maturity

Sue Watling / January 17, 2014 / digital literacies, open education, PhD, Teaching and Learning in a Digital Age (TELEDA)

codeacademyFirstLessonAchievement codeacademy Exercises10Achievement

I’ve been badging. Like buses, there were none for ages then they all come at once. I can’t embed my javascript animation on this page but to prove my new found skills here is the code.

var red = [0, 100, 63];
var orange = [40, 100, 60];
var green = [75, 100, 40];
var blue = [196, 77, 55];
var purple = [280, 50, 60];

var myName = “suewatling”;
var letterColors = [red, orange, green]
if(15>5) {bubbleShape = “circle”;
}
else {bubbleShape = “square”;
}
drawName(myName, letterColors);
bounceBubbles()

It was an interactive template so not as clever as it looks. But it does look clever! Here’s a screenshot. Thank you Code Academy for the illusion of skill. Click here for the full animation.

The language of code intrigues me but this post is about badging. I gained my rewards for working through the first Code Academy lesson. They’re badges but not as I know them; these are PNG images with no metadata. Mozilla woz not ‘ere. Since Doug Belshaw’s visit in December I’ve dug deep into Cloudworks to find my OLDs MOOC site: DIY Multimedia for Teaching and Learning and made a retrospective claim so my Mozilla Backpack now looks like this.

Not much is it? I’m not really a collector. The ultimate question with all collections is what to do with them? The language of badging hasn’t caught on. My Thesaurus only recognises ‘badgers’ as animals or 50 shades of botherance – such as bedevil, beleager, bore, bother, break and bug. I entered ‘badging’ and was asked if I meant bagging, banging or bandaging. The art of badge collection has a long way to go before it reaches linguistic maturity.

Will virtual badgery catch on? Who can tell. Virtual reality is a slippery substance. There’s a risk a proliferation of badging will dilute their impact and create confusion. When is a badge not a badge? To badge or not to badge? Why badge in the first place? Alternative accreditation is a serious issue. Badging a serious attempt to create an authentic assessment system. But it’s open to people taking advantage and awarding badges here, there and everywhere for all aspects of human endeavour like arriving on time or breathing. My Code Academy badges were fun but that’s about all. The OLDS MOOC badges may have more credibility but are not fully mobile and can only be shared on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook or through my personal Open Badges URL I can’t put them where I want them which is my LinkedIn Profile and this WordPress blog.

So I’m relinquishing badge collecting in favour of…….well, I’m not sure. There’s something irresistible about gaining rewards without tears and at least they don’t have nicotine, calories or alcohol units. But like a virtual stamp album, there isn’t the appeal of something you can hold in your hand or stitch on your sleeve or backpack. When badges can be anything you want them to be then – to be honest – who’s really going to be that interested?

Let’s get digital – digital literacies workshop with Doug Belshaw

Sue Watling / December 18, 2013January 18, 2014 / digital literacies, PhD, Teaching and Learning in a Digital Age (TELEDA)

Doug suggests eight elements of digital literacies. If we interpret elements as characteristics this gives some idea of their complexity but not what they are. Maybe we need to look at categories. For example media digital literacies, information digital literacies, web digital literacies etc. But there are also digital literacies at subject level where the requirement for arts, science, food manufacture, nursing and social work might all derive from different learning styles and professional ways of working. Add digital scholarship, digital pedagogy and digital identity and it’s clear you can have too much of a digital thing – there are too many digital literacies. We need an alternative taxonomy; a way to simplify the complexity.

‘Digital literacy is a condition not a threshold.’*

Doug repeated this several times. But it’s only a condition if you are in the right place and time for it to happen. A shared starting point is necessary to begin the conversation. We might need thresholds after all. In Social Work in a Digital Society, I use threshold concepts to present digital literacies as social practices Social Work in a Digital Society Threshold Concepts Here each successive layer of understanding increases knowledge and alters practice. A threshold is like a starting line – a place to begin.

I think I get the concept of digital literacies as a condition – being prepared to accept a digital dimension to your life and having the confidence to explore new digital landscapes – but access and support is necessary as are specific goals and outcomes. In the way you need the alphabet to read, so you need basic tools to become digitally literate. The tools are the thresholds. We need to look at the building blocks of digital literacies like file formats and management, attachments and file sizes before RSS, building mashups and remixing code.

Maybe the best way to grasp digital literacies is to see them as the online equivalents of everything we do off-line.

To encourage and support confidence with digital ways of working means engaging with the affordances, finding the tipping points or thresholds which make a difference. These will be different for everyone but they are already out there. We just need to find them; like Doug’s quote from William Gibson ‘ The future is already here, but is unevenly distributed.’

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* Martin, A. (2006). ‘Literacies for the Digital Age: A Preview of Part 1’ in A. Martin and D. Madigan , eds, Digital Literacies for Learning. London: Facet Publishing, pp .3–25.