Page 116 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

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Multiple literacy. Competence, skills and abilities for navigating the current context of reading
Today’s readers have at their disposal a huge amount of texts and information of all kinds consisting of a combination of interacting codes as opposed to plain text, and they access them in very different ways. In this new context it is more important for readers to be able to clearly specify their needs; to be aware of and skilled at using the search mechanisms required by each situa- tion; to be able to judge the relevance of findings and choose their reading materials; to understand what they read, and capture and espouse the message; and finally, be capable of reconstructing, reformulating and critically transforming the content, whatever its type, grasped from reading.
It is therefore necessary to pool efforts to ensure that children, teenagers and adults manage to develop competence and skills enabling them
to search efficiently and effectively; are able
to judge information critically and choose and decide accordingly; and are capable of reading comprehensively and completing the cycle by establishing good communication, building their own messages and expressing their opinions with arguments, verbally or by any other means.
The way books offer readers content is changing
How readers access a work’s content varies depending on whether it is a print or digital book, and this is true of the various types
of texts that are designed to meet different information needs and require different search and reading strategies. Making effective and competent use of each source, depending on its type and format, thus entails being familiar with its conventions. This necessarily requires prior training in how to use each of these materials. As Javier Valbuena argues,27 teaching digital skills should be the centrepiece of educational and cultural strategies.
Unless this matter is addressed clearly and firmly, and coherent and ambitious plans for all aspects of literacy are established, digital reading and the integration of technology will be affected and their development undermined, apart from the serious problems citizens’ lack of digital skills can pose to their personal, academic, professional, political and social development.
Citizens’ digital competence put to the test
A study carried out by the Stanford History Education Group28 on a large group of American university students assessed their ability to eval- uate different types of information of the kind they regularly handle on their mobile phones, tablets and computers.
Fifty-six tasks were proposed and 7,804 answers given by students of 12 states belonging to different socioeconomic levels were assessed. As Julio Alonso Arévalo stresses,29 some of the most significant results of the study are:
• 82% of students are incapable of distin- guishing between sponsored content and real news on a website.
• Most students lend more credence to a piece of news on the basis of the photo- graphs it may contain as opposed to the reliability of the source it comes from.
• For 88% the main source of information is Facebook and other social media.
“‘Many people assume that because young people are fluent in social media they are equally perceptive about what they find there’, points out Professor Sam Wineburg, 30 the lead author of the report and founder of SHEG. ‘Our work shows the opposite to be true.’” Indeed, as the report states, students show a dismaying inabil- ity to reason about digital content in general.
READING
Readers in the digital age