Researching Digital Literacy

            Information Literacy as a term by itself has changed over the years as society is becoming more technologically advanced.  With information being so readily available via the internet and social media channels, instructors, librarians and other information professionals are finding the need to educate our students and youth with the proper tools and skills they’ll need to be savvy fact-finding researchers. How are we as information professionals using digital initiatives and emerging technology to teach information literacy to our students and younger generations? Are we keeping up with the needs of our more tech-conscious generation by exploring new methodologies and pedagogies brought to us by the sweeping tide of technology? 

            In researching what it means to teach information literacy to the tech-savvy youth of our generation, I came up on so many really interesting articles, which I'll list below for you to check out at your own leisure, but one of the most interesting discoveries this week was my discovery of Doug Belshaw's work on Digital Literacy.  

Doug Belshaw's 8 Elements of Digital Literacies

Two years ago, Doug published a post The 8 C's of Digital Literacy where he lists the 8 C's as "elements" of digital literacy. I am reproducing these below.

• Cultural [Cu]
• Cognitive [Cg]
• Constructive [Cn]
• Communication [Co]
• Confidence [Cf]
• Creative [Cr]
• Critical [Ct]
• Civic [Ci]

The Image below links to a slideshare where he shares his ideas (which he admits were born from spontaneous brain waves related to his Thesis brainstorming at the time) and offers up interesting concepts folks in the fields of Information Science can take to build their own curricula in terms of teaching information literacy. 

As I traced responses to Belshaw's ideas back through his readership, one teacher, Kevin McLaughlin, writes back in response to Belshaw's work how influential the "8 C's" were to his attempts towards teaching digital literacy in the primary classroom.

How to Develop Digital Literacies in Yourself and Others from Doug Belshaw

I'm curious now to see how these ideas translate into a primary classroom, especially as my topic is centered on  youth information literacy instruction on a digital scale! I'll be following McLaughlin's blog and hopefully he keeps it updated with progress.