Digital thoughts

I have just joined a small digital information literacy research project. We met together for the first time this afternoon and began our adventure.

I am thinking about what digital information literacy is? Where will it take me in the future as a teacher? What will I learn and perhaps how will I influence that future? As a digital immigrant rather than a digital native, to what extent will my ventures into the digital world be clumsy and culturally inept? - and will this matter? - and who would judge?

To what extent is the digital age creating a new elite of those with access to computers and broadband? The new eeePCs and other mini laptops may go some way to address the digital divide - will it be far enough? Who is excluded when as teachers we create more digital information and learning materials? Who is empowered? How do we address these potential inequities? How and with whom do we advocate for students to obtain laptops and broadband internet access for example? Is it good enough simply to have computers on site in learning institutions or do we need to do more so students have these tools in their own hands in their own places not just ours?

In New Zealand it may be realistic to expect that the majority of students will have these tools within the next couple of years. It has already changed so much even in the last five years. But what about other countries? Is it increasing the divisions between the haves and the have nots?

What if by increasing our reliance on digital information we are missing out on other important ways of knowing that depend on personal encounters with people, places, things and events?

I am curious about how the web has the potential to be a vehicle by which we create our own reality either deliberately, for example through this blog, or inadvertantly through the searches we do on line, the materials we purchase or view, and the interactions we have with others in this etheric community.

I was extemely interested in the thought of the distributed nature of the web, its interconnectedness rather than logical heirarcy - I feel I need to know more about how this works.

I am curous about trust and truth and to what extent this really matters. How much can I believe in what I see and find? How I can evaluate content and discourse.

I enjoyed listening to others discuss their potential projects in the group. I saw the enthusiasm in our faces, heard the hesitancy in the confessions of what we did not know yet and wanted to find out. In the sense that everything was possible - yet in a 10 week time frame? I am pleased that others are thinking about similar projects and reassured about the amount of support available.

I wondered how much more I learned from sitting and watching and listening to others in the group rather than just reading and interacting on line.

I am certainly looking forward to the next 9 weeks. I doubt that I will find the answers to all the questions I have posed here, yet the exploration of even my own simple project will be fascinating and lead me on an unpredicatable journer of discovery.