I want to tell you a story, teacher, but it might be a little different than what you’re used to. It’s a story about power, and the people who wield it. It has to do with the relationships between people and capital, and I want to tell it, because it’s a story that needs to be told. You see, our world is going through a media revolution, and digital literacy is emerging as a prominent survival tool for life in the new millenium. As with the advent of other major eras, such as the invention of the printing press, and the discovery of the Americas, the rapid expansion of the digital frontier presents tremendous potential for power imbalances between people who are digitally literate, and people who are not (Fagerberg et al., 1997; Mishra & Koehler, 2009; Acemoglu et al., 2014). I am concerned that our students aren’t getting the support they need in acquiring digital literacy, and I want to help frame the concept through my own personal narrative to assist the next generation of parents and teachers in being able to teach effective learning skills for the digital age. Guerrilla Teacher is a story about empowering individuals through practical knowledge, and professional advice. It is by no means a unique story, as many people share it; and yet, there’s no real way to capture the point of it at all, except to tell the story for what it is, and to use it to help frame the bigger picture. My friend, Guerrilla Teacher is my story, and I’m retelling it for you to help you see past all the data, and to understand what’s really at stake in the pursuit of digital literacy. Thanks for reading.

Song Power

There’s a documentary that’s been out since 2013 called “The History of the Eagles”. I suspect that it resurfaced after the passing of Glenn Frey, since I remember watching it with that news still fresh. There was this one part in the documentary, when Joe Walsh was discussing the departure of Don Felder from the Eagles in 2001, where he explained that Felder and the other band members, Don Henley and Glenn Frey, essentially couldn’t agree on numbers. Felder objected to how much more money Henley and Frey were paying themselves after reforming the band, since, at a previous point in the Eagles’ history, everything was split more evenly. What Joe Walsh says about that interaction has stuck with me ever since watching the documentary. He says that it all comes down to a concept called ‘Song Power’, and that, essentially, without contributing to the songs that actually make it on a record, you don’t get much of a say in how the band splits its profits. A quick reference through Google confirms the artists’ relative ‘song power’. Don Henley is listed on 63 tracks by the Eagles, while Don Felder is named on just six. Thus, based on the raw number of songs they each wrote for the Eagles that were released, it’s fair to say that one was a more prolific writer for the Eagles than the other. So why is this relevant?

In 2006, I started my first business: A partnership called Prism Window Cleaning in Mississauga, Ontario. My partner and I handled everything. We managed our own sales, we managed our own cleaning, we managed our own clients. Everything. A few years later, I ended up moving back to Ottawa, and I took a branch of the business back with me, effectively leaving everything that we had acquired in Mississauga to my partner so that I could restart in my hometown. The following season, I brought my brother into the partnership, and trained him that summer to take over the business for a while. I had signed a contract earlier in the season to move overseas and teach English in Seoul, South Korea, and there was no reason to give everything up, so I made him the offer.

While I was overseas, my brother invested his time heavily into the business, and, as a result, was able to take it online within a year of my departure. Our online presence increased business dramatically, and it quickly became apparent that he would need to develop more and better systems to keep track of all of the action that would happen in a day for him. Unfortunately, as I wasn’t physically present during this critical growth period, I wasn’t able to put my name on a lot of the capital that my own company was developing, and I paid a steep price for my absence. When I came back from South Korea, things were totally different. My brother was, too. Unfortunately, a severe friction emerged between us, and, within three years, I was basically pushed out of my own company, on the grounds that it was the website that had built the company to where it was, not the guy who started the company in the first place. We just couldn’t see eye to eye on a lot of issues, and it became time to move on. Now, don’t get the wrong idea. I love my brother, and we have reconciled since this. Our little window cleaning business is still growing, now 12 years later, and the truth is, by taking our business for himself, my brother actually removed a major headache for me, and enabled me to get into teaching professionally in Canada. But that’s a complicated discussion for something that’s all in hindsight anyway. At the time, it was a painful experience.

Now, here’s the lesson. What my brother did to me was no different than Joe Walsh’s account of the relationship between Don Henley and Don Felder. If Don Henley wrote that many more songs than Don Felder, and those songs are the reason why the Eagles are the highest selling American band in the history of American bands (retrieved: here), then Don Henley has every right to make that claim, and so does my brother to make his. Think about it. At the end of the day, individual power is about personal capital, and the truth is, while my brother did take that company from me, he also had a certain right to do so. When I left the company to my brother before moving to South Korea, I left him with about 300 clients. By the time I returned, just two years later, we had about 2000. He’s the one who built the means for that to happen, so there’s not much you can say bout it in the end. I didn’t own the means to my own capital, and I became a prisoner inside my own company as a result.

I understand that the point of this lesson is harsh, teacher, and that it goes against many of the ideals that you try to create for your students in your role as a public educator, but I need you to see that truth. I want you to understand that the world doesn’t care, and that, if a person wants to stand on their own two feet, then they need to build that reality for themselves. Our world is going digital, and those with the means to build their own capital in this digital world of ours will find themselves on top of it far more often than those without. This is what you’re fighting for. What follows is a framework for the nature of digital literacy, and how you can turn a few simple tricks for teaching digital literacy into a fully functional pedagogy for the entire subject. If you’re ready, teacher, then this is the part where you swallow the red pill, and toss away the blue one. I welcome you to Guerrilla Teacher.

On the Threshold

Part of the problem of teaching digital literacy in today’s public schools is that it’s difficult to define, making it even more difficult to conceptualize within the context of a curriculum. Looking into the various definitions, one finds that the term itself is constructed from multiple, loosely defined sub-literacies, which are then amalgamated into a singular concept (Koltay, 2011; Martin & Grudziecki, 2008). Unfortunately, many of the terms and ideas used to describe these various sub-literacies are very similar to each other, leading to considerable ambiguity between the definitions (Buckingham, 2010; Eshet-Alkalai, 2004). Martin and Grudziecki confirm this in their article, DigEULit: Concepts and Tools for Digital Literacy Development, when stating:

… that there is considerable overlap between the literacies outlined above. In some cases, the definitions of the different literacies are almost identical, and only nuanced in different directions, as a result of their pathways from pre-digital foci, and their sense of the concerns of the particular community whom they have developed to serve. (Martin & Grudziecki, 2008, p. 250)

This is an issue because, by generating all of these different names for different facets of digital literacy, and then viewing all of these facets as separate elements of the same concept, we’re over-compartmentalizing the concept, and preventing ourselves from seeing some of the underlying commonalities between the different elements of the idea. This is an important limitation because our world is changing, and many teachers are having trouble keeping up with the pace of digital innovation within modern society (Cuban, 1993; Cuban, 2012). Overly pedantic descriptions of the numerous different facets of digital literacy are preventing teachers from absorbing key features of the concept as a whole, and so, we should seek to simplify the term before we begin defining and unpacking it.

Okay, so how do we simplify digital literacy? This is a difficult question to answer completely, but one promising option is to try to look at the underlying threshold concepts which inform our ‘less-than’ digital literacies, and to see how those concepts bridge into the fully digital definition that we’re searching for. Okay... so what’s a ‘threshold concept’ then? The idea of a threshold concept is that they’re concepts which are central to mastery over a given subject area because they are integrative, and because they expose the interrelatedness of subject-based phenomena between similar subject areas through such integrations (Cousin, 2006). Looking back at that Martin and Grudziecki (2008) passage from the above paragraph, do you notice that the authors provide descriptions of the ambiguities they’re discussing? This is useful. They point out that the differences between many different forms of digital literacy are “nuanced in different directions, as a result of their pathways from pre-digital foci, and their sense of the concerns of the particular community whom they have developed to serve.” (Martin & Grudziecki, 2008) This is important information, because it helps frame a larger picture than what schools are currently seeing, and, for us to understand that picture, we’re going to need to rely on the idea of threshold concepts to start connecting some of the dots.

Now, moving forward, and building on this idea of a type ‘retro-connectivity’ between the defining attributes of related literacies, let’s continue with that Martin and Grudziecki article from 2008. As part of their research, the authors develop a list of six different literacies associated under the term ‘digital literacy’, and then trace those literacies back historically. This helps the reader see connections between some of the different literacies and their cultural origins, for example, in how the authors describe ‘visual literacy’.

Visual images have always been a powerful medium for the interpretation of information and the communication of meaning, in science as well as art, and in dealing with the exigencies of everyday life. The wealth and complexity of visual imagery which is possible using digital tools emphasises the power of the visual. (Martin & Grudziecki, 2008, p. 252)

Following the authors’ description, it’s evident that there’s a connection between older and newer media, based on visual stimuli. In fact, the idea that visual stimuli have ‘always’ been such a powerful medium should lead one to gather that visual interpretation likely is, or that it holds threshold concepts for both visual and media literacy in general, be they mundane, electronic, or digital. Take a second to think about that. What types of visual connections do you notice in the digital world, teacher, and how can you model those types of threshold concepts for your students, especially through other literacies? These are the types of questions that digitally attuned teachers consider when planning; and the types of connections that extend well past ‘visual literacy’ as well.

Remember how I mentioned that Martin and Grudziecki (2008) listed six different types of literacies in their article? They were: ICT, Technological, Informational, Medial, Visual, and Communicational literacies. Now, without getting into an overly pedantic discussion about where someone should start researching digital pedagogy, this list is probably one of the better starting points you could reference as you look to build connections within the field. It’s a simple list, sure, but the core concepts of their list are further reinforced around interconnectivity, which binds the definitions together rather than holding them disparately, and thus, dissuades nuance. This is very useful. As a general appeal, I would also consider many Scandinavian nations to be ahead of North American nations in terms of developing digital pedagogy, and we will be looking at the Norwegian curriculum further into this guide as we talk about the purpose of digital literacy; further ‘check’, if you will, for the work of the DigEULit community. That said, regardless of the particular ‘angle’ that you choose to explore first, as you grow in your quest to develop relevant digital pedagogy for today’s students, try to remember this: The point of your endeavours shouldn’t be to define different literacies that your students ought to know. This will only lead to more burden, as you’ll have to unpack everything that you define before you can actually teach it. Rather, make it a point to seek connections between known definitions of digital literacy to start building relevant digital pedagogy. That’s what's at stake here.

I hope you’re starting to see it now. This isn’t just learning to type on a laptop, or reading a book through an iPad, or something like that; but those are certainly both part of it. Digital literacy is about learning to process abstract stimuli into meaningful conclusions, and doing so within a digital environment. This isn’t significantly different from other forms of literacy, except for the caveat about processing the information digitally, which refers to the nature of the medium. In the next section, I want to show you that this is actually what all of literacy is about, not just digital literacy. In essence, literacy is a form of technology, and the two exist in relation to each other to help people learn to use media. Bear with me here. We’re crossing a major threshold...

Literally, a Technology

“Fuck off!” he said, “I can’t get it to work properly. How do I change the colour of three cells at the same time?” “Remember that trick we looked at back on day one for affecting multiple objects on the screen?” I replied. “Yeah,” he said “but every time I do it, it keeps selecting everything. See?” “Hmmm, k cool... Can you do it again? I wanna see your process.” “Sure, just a sec… See, there it is again.” “K, I see. It’s ‘cause you’re using shift and not control. Here, try it this way. This actually works in a number of different applications because...”

The anecdote above is from building an invoice template with one of my students. One of the latter steps of the activity asks the student to shade the subtotal, taxes, and total cells at the same time, and I generally insist that these instructions be upheld to the word. The reason that I request this is because those cells aren’t in a series, meaning that the student is likely to shade many more cells than just the three requested, unless they use the ‘CTRL’ key. While there is nothing wrong with doing this activity by either changing the cells individually, nor by changing all of the cells that activate from using a selection field and then changing back the incorrect cells, the reason why I ask for just those three cells to be shaded is to get my students to remember about using ‘SHIFT’ and ‘CTRL’ for selecting multiple objects in different situations. I want them to see that the same processes that we used for moving multiple files around on a desktop on day one still apply when using spreadsheets and word processors, or many other applications for that matter. It’s something that the developers of these applications want you to be able to learn and apply systematically. While there are actually several different teaching techniques at play here, we’ll talk about them some more in part two when we look at manipulating affordances and cognitive load (Gibson, 1979; Sweller et al., 1998). For now, look at this connection like it’s a type of threshold concept. In a way it is, but in another way, it’s so much more. Let me explain.

This type of connection exists across digital literacy, though it isn’t always as obvious as the trick I explained above. It’s called a technology, and it’s employed through elements of design, colour use, word choice, etc. As I suggested earlier, technologies play an important role in media design because they enable people to reason about media through conventions, and by following historical precedents. This is because companies on the open market don’t want you to feel confused about their products and retreat back into the comfort of what you know and trust, so they integrate what you already know and trust into their future designs. This is why major conceptual features are often either unchanged, or only cosmetically changed between different versions of media. Think about it. Would you want to suddenly switch to a smartphone that was only voice activated? That’s just not how new products get sold. While this may seem subtle and obvious, it’s important to understand because it leads to a valuable realization: Cultural aggregates, at least in North American society, are generally market driven. This opens up a much larger debate about the relative potential of teacher autonomy against the inherent stability of curricular outcomes that I’m not delving into with this guidebook, suffice to suggest that artificially created cultural aggregates (i.e. normalized outcomes within a curriculum) are not as relevant as their reality based counterparts, despite being easier to centralize within an institution. While this centralization may be easier to regulate, it simultaneously prevents innovation, and blunts inquiry-based learning. As I said earlier though, that’s a discussion for a different time. I want to use this book to explain how technologies work, and why understanding how technologies work is so critical for teaching digital literacy.

Arun Lakhana (2014) recently wrote a paper wherein he explored the ambiguity of the term ‘educational technology’, largely by focusing on defining technology itself. “At its simplest,” he says, “ET appears to pertain to the application of mechanical and material tools (especially computers and computer programs) to problems in education. A more complex conception of ET includes immaterial tools, such as processes and ways of thinking, and it addresses the causal interdependence between intellectual growth and technological growth, whereby technology is not merely processes and tools, but is understood systemically.” His emphasis on viewing soft technologies in the same light as hard technologies, and his clear identification of ‘immaterial tools’ and ‘intellectual growth’ as forms of technology are what’re important to consider in the passage, because those are the ideas that pave the way for seeing literacy as a type of technology. Check out how Lakhana describes ‘ideas’ to see where I’m going with this. He says: ideas are “instruments of discovery both for individuals and for society at large. Pragmatically, what an idea does constitutes its meaning. Ideas thus function as malleable tools of inquiry – ends and means – for the development of further logical and ethical ideals.” (Lakhana, 2014) This implies that, for Lakhana, an idea is a technology because it is a type of tool for enhancing knowledge. Well outside the conventional understanding of the word, but, as I suggested earlier, not entirely unlike the concept of literacy, as we’ll discover.

In another article called Shaking Up the School House (2008), Philip Schlechty helps triangulate Lakhana’s position by discussing technology as “the means of doing the job, whatever the means and whatever the job may be.” Clearly, both authors share an understanding that technology is more than just a computer, but when Schlechty suggests that: “The oldest technologies of teaching are story-telling, the dialogue, and the monologue (lecture)” and that “the invention of the technology of writing led to such advanced tools as the handwritten manuscript, which in turn required more skill (the ability to read) on the part of both teacher and student”, it casts the whole concept of literacy in a remarkably different light. Literacy is neither abstract, nor limited to languages. It is a tool, both biological and intellectual in nature, and designed to employ processes and ways of thinking for enhancing knowledge through a medium. In establishing literacy as a form of technology, it then follows that digital literacy is simply a set of technologies for using digital media. Does that make sense?

Lakhana’s article is about understanding that soft technologies should be included within the same definition as the more conventional, and heavily favoured definition of technology that sees it exclusively as hardware. He uses Dewey’s (1938) definition of inquiry as a form of technology, as well as the American Heritage Dictionary (2009), which states that “technology refers to applications, methods, theories, and practices that are used to reach desirable ends, especially industrial and commercial ends”, to back up his claim. Now, let’s go back and take another look at how I opened this section of the guide. It might have seemed like I was talking about threshold concepts, but, as I implied, that wasn’t really all that you saw, it was just a part of it. What I was really talking about back there, in addition to emphasizing the larger pedagogical approach of teaching through a threshold concept, was teaching a technology. Lakhana (2014) describes intellectual technologies as intellectual processes which mediate between inputs and outputs. As inputs, I provided the student with the information (that we had seen a similar concept on the first day), and the environment (a spreadsheet application where I knew this process would work). During the lesson, we looked at the process. First, just him, while I observed to make sure that my subsequent instruction would be appropriate, but then, together, and into a fresh zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978). Finally, during the output, we discussed the technology that we had just looked at, and I informed him that it could actually be applied under a number of different scenarios. Of course, I don’t expect him to grasp or remember the whole concept right away. That’s just not how guided mastery works. But I planted a seed, which may grow with sufficient practice. As a digital instructor, your job is to provide as many reasonable opportunities as possible for students to learn digitally relevant technologies, by testing inputs through perceived outputs, the way I’ve just described here. Over time, literacies will emerge based on the technological conventions which most effectively produce an outcome within a specific medium. When these literacies emerge, simply note them and move on. The technologies that form these literacies will come back over and over, and the more experience that you have with a particular medium, the greater your understanding of the technologies which affect that medium will be. As you consolidate your understanding of these technologies, larger threshold concepts will emerge on which you can build an effective pedagogy. This is the nature of digital literacy.

The Thing About Fractions

I’ve always enjoyed teaching fractions. It was my favourite subject area to teach in elementary education. By my estimation, mastery over fractions by the end of sixth grade is the pinnacle of achievement in elementary numeracy. This is both for the number of mathematical technologies that a student has to call on to work through an operation using fractions, but also for the number of threshold concepts that elementary fractions may unlock in future mathematical endeavours. That’s why I was so disappointed at this one parent/teacher meeting where my unit on fractions was called into question for teaching students how to add them. Why? Because these were fourth grade students, and adding and subtracting fractions in Alberta is started at the fifth grade level. It didn’t matter that adding fractions was only the goal for inquiry, not the assessment. It didn’t matter that my unit plan discreetly trained each student in the background technologies that would be required before adding the fractions. It didn’t even matter that I was the professional who had worked with the students over the last six weeks, who understood their strengths and weaknesses, and who was perfectly capable of scaffolding the project, or even shutting it down if I was wrong. Grade four students. Grade five objective. That was it.

This memory is so vivid for me because it highlights one of the great flaws of our education system; and is something that you will likely have to deal with in teaching digital literacy. The principal who questioned me teaching students how to add fractions was literally right, but figuratively quite damaging. The fact that I caught resistance for deliberately planning up by a grade is quite stifling, and speaks to that debate about teacher autonomy that I was alluding to earlier. She had authority and the curriculum in her corner. I had context mixed with intelligent design in mine. Authority won, but the truth is that every student in that class benefited from the inquiry into adding fractions, even if it was advanced. We solidified our basic arithmetic, we looked at new literary conventions in how fractions, decimals, and percentiles are represented, we identified that numbers between zero and one are different than numbers greater than one, and we learned that decimals, fractions, and percentages are all the same technology, just at different stages of completion. It was quite vexing.

So, what does teaching fractions have to do with the nature of digital literacy? Nothing and everything, depending on how you look at it. Going back to Schlechty’s article (2008), I want to start by highlighting a comparison that he makes regarding two different mediums. He says:

Now we are facing a technological shift that seems destined to have effects on schooling even more profound than the effects of the printing press. Like the printing press, this technology is not simply an extension of or an improvement on existing technologies. It is different in kind, rather than in degree. This technology is the ability to electronically transmit, receive, store, and process information. Although this revolution has been underway for nearly a century in the form of radio and then of television and recording technologies, it is only now, with the arrival of such tools as computers, the Internet, portable and compact electronic audio and video recorders, and fiber optics that educators are beginning to appreciate the implications of this technological revolution for the conduct of schools' core business. Moreover, it is becoming clear that if public schools do not have new tools based on this technology available, if processes to access these tools are not available, and if teachers are not skilled in using these tools, alternative organizations will arise that do have these tools, processes, and skills. (Schlechty, 2008, p.32)

I apologize for the length of that passage, but I wanted to include it in its entirety, to highlight both the similarities between the printing press and the Internet, as well as the problem of how multifaceted many digital tools are becoming. Schlechty points out that this change has been manifesting over a long period and through many different media, such as radio and television, or the printed medias before them. He is correct, but the issue is that newer media generally don’t replace older ones. (Schlechty, 2008) It is more likely that newer media are integrated into older ones instead, innovation being far more common than invention. Take the Internet, for example. Radio and television didn’t go away with the advent of the Internet, nor is the Internet either a bigger TV, or a louder radio. It is actually a different way of presenting either television or radio altogether. As a result of the Internet, both radio and television now exist in two seperate media: 1) either as stand alone radios and televisions, or 2) as .mp4, .mp3, or .avi files, housed and accessed through a server. Now, see how the author describes the printing press as a ’basic shift in educational technology’ that overcomes the issues of access to knowledge, as well as access to valid knowledge? This is fundamentally what is happening with the advent of digital technologies. People have access to greater degrees of increasingly accurate knowledge, creating an issue where the traditional role and purpose of the teacher is being assumed by digital media, and therefore, the focus of education by the teacher should be moving into the application of those media. This is confirmed by Schlechty again, when he says, ‘once the hardware is defined (books, pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers for the press, for example), what remains is for schools to provide both access to this hardware, as well as teachers who understand how to use it.’

Now then, back to fractions. I suggested earlier that understanding how to teach fractions was the key to understanding how to teach digital literacy, and here’s what I meant. Fractions sit along a continuum where understanding the building blocks of that continuum is necessary for understanding, fundamentally, what a fraction is. That’s why I suggested earlier that we learned that there is a difference between numbers from zero to one, and numbers greater than one, or that decimals, fractions, and percentages were all the same technology, just at different stages of completion. It’s important that students understand these relationships as threshold concepts so that they can use them as building blocks for their own inquiry learning. The instruction of digital literacy has similar needs, as many technologies build on, or are enhanced through their relationship with each other, and ultimately, it’s the application of the medium that defines how its onstituent technologies are being used. While our example only discussed different types of media that were built into each other, the same is true for technologies within the digital sphere as well, such as coding, or data analysis. What’s different is that some of these technologies draw from other technologies in more traditional, core subject areas; and while there are curricular objectives that can be interpreted as useful for teaching digital literacy, I have had trouble explaining these connections to people in positions of authority, and noted a certain reluctance towards cross curricular planning for some of the more ‘avant garde’ curricular needs of teaching digital literacy.

These are important issues because, fractions and digital literacy are both subject areas where, based on how we’re taught to teach, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that the basic relationship of how schools and curriculums are organized with each other impedes certain pedagogical avenues for their instruction. Many technologies for operating inside a digital environment have very simple roots, but become complex quite quickly, and require specific training to accomplish work. Excel or Wordpress are good examples here, where navigating the application itself isn’t that difficult in relation to navigating other applications, however, appropriately using the application requires knowledge of either the Excel language, for Excel, or Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and others, for Wordpress. While it’s all well and good to have everything pieced out at specific echelons within a curriculum, as technologies grow increasingly complex, it will become increasingly unfeasible for schools to maintain those curricular standards for the leading edges of digital pedagogy. As long as teachers are encouraged to practice inquiry-based learning, schools and school boards may have to accept that inquiry-based learning within the digital environment could, initially, have teachers bouncing all over the curriculum to make ends meet. As teachers practice their craft, and schools and school boards enhance their digital planning and pedagogies, these aberances will abate, but if you’re blazing a trail, teacher, be careful. As long as schools and school boards continue to use the curriculum as a rule of law, I would not advise that you propose planning into anything too ambitious, because the logistics and planning required for certain advanced digital tools will lead you down rabbit holes that may discredit your professionalism, just for trying to innovate. Now, as your digital pedagogy starts blossoming, look for schools and school boards that are more flexible, and which allow greater teacher autonomy. Those are the places where some of your ideas might start to take hold and flourish, but it may be up to you to find them.

The Thing About Fractions

I’ve always enjoyed teaching fractions. It was my favourite subject area to teach in elementary education. By my estimation, mastery over fractions by the end of sixth grade is the pinnacle of achievement in elementary numeracy. This is both for the number of mathematical technologies that a student has to call on to work through an operation using fractions, but also for the number of threshold concepts that elementary fractions may unlock in future mathematical endeavours. That’s why I was so disappointed at this one parent/teacher meeting where my unit on fractions was called into question for teaching students how to add them. Why? Because these were fourth grade students, and adding and subtracting fractions in Alberta is started at the fifth grade level. It didn’t matter that adding fractions was only the goal for inquiry, not the assessment. It didn’t matter that my unit plan discreetly trained each student in the background technologies that would be required before adding the fractions. It didn’t even matter that I was the professional who had worked with the students over the last six weeks, who understood their strengths and weaknesses, and who was perfectly capable of scaffolding the project, or even shutting it down if I was wrong. Grade four students. Grade five objective. That was it.

This memory is so vivid for me because it highlights one of the great flaws of our education system; and is something that you will likely have to deal with in teaching digital literacy. The principal who questioned me teaching students how to add fractions was literally right, but figuratively quite damaging. The fact that I caught resistance for deliberately planning up by a grade is quite stifling, and speaks to that debate about teacher autonomy that I was alluding to earlier. She had authority and the curriculum in her corner. I had context mixed with intelligent design in mine. Authority won, but the truth is that every student in that class benefited from the inquiry into adding fractions, even if it was advanced. We solidified our basic arithmetic, we looked at new literary conventions in how fractions, decimals, and percentiles are represented, we identified that numbers between zero and one are different than numbers greater than one, and we learned that decimals, fractions, and percentages are all the same technology, just at different stages of completion. It was quite vexing.

So, what does teaching fractions have to do with the nature of digital literacy? Nothing and everything, depending on how you look at it. Going back to Schlechty’s article (2008), I want to start by highlighting a comparison that he makes regarding two different mediums. He says:

Now we are facing a technological shift that seems destined to have effects on schooling even more profound than the effects of the printing press. Like the printing press, this technology is not simply an extension of or an improvement on existing technologies. It is different in kind, rather than in degree. This technology is the ability to electronically transmit, receive, store, and process information. Although this revolution has been underway for nearly a century in the form of radio and then of television and recording technologies, it is only now, with the arrival of such tools as computers, the Internet, portable and compact electronic audio and video recorders, and fiber optics that educators are beginning to appreciate the implications of this technological revolution for the conduct of schools' core business. Moreover, it is becoming clear that if public schools do not have new tools based on this technology available, if processes to access these tools are not available, and if teachers are not skilled in using these tools, alternative organizations will arise that do have these tools, processes, and skills. (Schlechty, 2008, p.32)

I apologize for the length of that passage, but I wanted to include it in its entirety, to highlight both the similarities between the printing press and the Internet, as well as the problem of how multifaceted many digital tools are becoming. Schlechty points out that this change has been manifesting over a long period and through many different media, such as radio and television, or the printed medias before them. He is correct, but the issue is that newer media generally don’t replace older ones. (Schlechty, 2008) It is more likely that newer media are integrated into older ones instead, innovation being far more common than invention. Take the Internet, for example. Radio and television didn’t go away with the advent of the Internet, nor is the Internet either a bigger TV, or a louder radio. It is actually a different way of presenting either television or radio altogether. As a result of the Internet, both radio and television now exist in two seperate media: 1) either as stand alone radios and televisions, or 2) as .mp4, .mp3, or .avi files, housed and accessed through a server. Now, see how the author describes the printing press as a ’basic shift in educational technology’ that overcomes the issues of access to knowledge, as well as access to valid knowledge? This is fundamentally what is happening with the advent of digital technologies. People have access to greater degrees of increasingly accurate knowledge, creating an issue where the traditional role and purpose of the teacher is being assumed by digital media, and therefore, the focus of education by the teacher should be moving into the application of those media. This is confirmed by Schlechty again, when he says, ‘once the hardware is defined (books, pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers for the press, for example), what remains is for schools to provide both access to this hardware, as well as teachers who understand how to use it.’

Now then, back to fractions. I suggested earlier that understanding how to teach fractions was the key to understanding how to teach digital literacy, and here’s what I meant. Fractions sit along a continuum where understanding the building blocks of that continuum is necessary for understanding, fundamentally, what a fraction is. That’s why I suggested earlier that we learned that there is a difference between numbers from zero to one, and numbers greater than one, or that decimals, fractions, and percentages were all the same technology, just at different stages of completion. It’s important that students understand these relationships as threshold concepts so that they can use them as building blocks for their own inquiry learning. The instruction of digital literacy has similar needs, as many technologies build on, or are enhanced through their relationship with each other, and ultimately, it’s the application of the medium that defines how its onstituent technologies are being used. While our example only discussed different types of media that were built into each other, the same is true for technologies within the digital sphere as well, such as coding, or data analysis. What’s different is that some of these technologies draw from other technologies in more traditional, core subject areas; and while there are curricular objectives that can be interpreted as useful for teaching digital literacy, I have had trouble explaining these connections to people in positions of authority, and noted a certain reluctance towards cross curricular planning for some of the more ‘avant garde’ curricular needs of teaching digital literacy.

These are important issues because, fractions and digital literacy are both subject areas where, based on how we’re taught to teach, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that the basic relationship of how schools and curriculums are organized with each other impedes certain pedagogical avenues for their instruction. Many technologies for operating inside a digital environment have very simple roots, but become complex quite quickly, and require specific training to accomplish work. Excel or Wordpress are good examples here, where navigating the application itself isn’t that difficult in relation to navigating other applications, however, appropriately using the application requires knowledge of either the Excel language, for Excel, or Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and others, for Wordpress. While it’s all well and good to have everything pieced out at specific echelons within a curriculum, as technologies grow increasingly complex, it will become increasingly unfeasible for schools to maintain those curricular standards for the leading edges of digital pedagogy. As long as teachers are encouraged to practice inquiry-based learning, schools and school boards may have to accept that inquiry-based learning within the digital environment could, initially, have teachers bouncing all over the curriculum to make ends meet. As teachers practice their craft, and schools and school boards enhance their digital planning and pedagogies, these aberances will abate, but if you’re blazing a trail, teacher, be careful. As long as schools and school boards continue to use the curriculum as a rule of law, I would not advise that you propose planning into anything too ambitious, because the logistics and planning required for certain advanced digital tools will lead you down rabbit holes that may discredit your professionalism, just for trying to innovate. Now, as your digital pedagogy starts blossoming, look for schools and school boards that are more flexible, and which allow greater teacher autonomy. Those are the places where some of your ideas might start to take hold and flourish, but it may be up to you to find them.

A Grand Design

That’s quite a lot of information, so thanks for sticking with me. I wanted you to see all of that, because I want you to understand what you’re up against. We covered a lot of ground back there, so let’s start with a recap before we tidy this up. Ready? If you choose this path, you will have several, major hurdles to overcome:

1) You’re dealing with a concept that spans the entirety of other concepts. It is huge to the point of bewilderment, and it will require a degree of perception on your part that will likely be challenged, often. In whichever direction you choose to start developing your digital pedagogy, you will have to know exactly what you’re talking about at all times, and be able to relate some very small details to some very large concepts. At times, this will require you to walk a fine line in a generally conservative profession. Play your cards wisely.

2) There isn’t a lot of practical support for what you’re doing. The curriculum before high school is sparse in digital literacy, to say the least, and the connections and threshold concepts that you initially find could stretch out all over the place. Furthermore, this area is not usually a strong suit for many school board educators, so finding strong allies and mentors may be tough. Cultivate a habit of patience when working with people. Many people will not initially agree with your view of literacy as a type of technology, and that’s okay. Developing this type of knowledge on a large scale will take time mixed with persistent effort, but under the right leadership, at the right time, you may succeed.

3) As if either of those first two issues weren’t enough, digital literacy, just on its own, is supremely challenging to teach. For one, you’ve just armed, what, 25 young and eager minds with a device capable of travelling anywhere in cyberspace? Ha! And you were worried about the fidget toys a half hour ago, so, good luck with that. But no, in all seriousness, you’re about to witness either the third or fourth most entropic, normal situation in all of public education, (at the elementary level, at least) right behind field trips, and indoor recesses. To do this properly, you’ll have to keep track of exactly where 25 unique minds just sailed off to, and you’ll potentially have to do it in a different world for each one. Furthermore, the issues that come up when teaching digital literacy are like playing a game of Whack ‘A’ Mole sometimes. You can’t even teach when it gets really thick because you’ve got to reset two computers, another five are on a dead battery from not being plugged in, your volunteer is probably just as scrambled as you are, and one of your students just whipped that fidget toy you were worried about at another one. That’s no joke, so, chin up teacher, you’re obviously made of stronger stuff.

Now, onto the good stuff, because teaching digital literacy is not all bad, as you’re going to see. For one, it is truly rewarding. Digital media can inspire our youth to work and collaborate in ways that non-digital media can’t attain as effectively. (Lin, S.M. & Griffith, P., 2015; Kern, 2015) Some activities that I like to do are group writing sessions with Google Slides, or have teams build multiplication tables with Google Sheets. I’ve even helped a team of students build an interactive board game using Slides again, where I showed them how to ‘lock’ shapes onto a slide, and then share the slide with each other so that they could play a type of virtual board game they had been developing, interactively, online, and from different classrooms. It was awesome! In the next section, we’re going to keep putting these connections in order while we look into digital culture, conventions, affordances, and how digital literacy fits into the larger picture, both within schools and beyond. Grab a coffee, take a walk, and pat yourself on the back. You did well. I’ll catch up again in the next section.

I want to continue my story with you. The one I was telling at the start of this book. You see, my journey didn’t finish when I left my company to become a classroom teacher. Far from it. Remember the point I was making earlier about how cultural aggregates are largely defined through competition? (Johnson, 2016; Buckingham, 2003) I want to come back to that for a second and explain my point more in depth for you. As a result of owning my small business, I have experience managing a couple thousand clients across the Ottawa Valley and into Quebec. No small order. One of the first things you learn in running a business is that, acquiring new business, while managing what you already have, takes up an exorbitant amount of time, and time is money. Effective businesses are able to leverage technologies to reduce the impact of time on simultaneously running and growing a business. This is where my teaching story changed forever, and I’m telling you what happened because it’s the type of story that just can’t be told through statistics.

Briefly, here’s how my old company’s process worked. The client would make contact, primarily through the phone or by email. Our answering machine would politely ask for the information necessary to conduct business with the client, and we had a contact form built into our website to increase the likelihood that web traffic would lead to a hit. Both the answering machine and the webpage reduced the need for a physical presence in certain areas of business growth, allowing us to spend more time per day on the services we were providing. And time is money. After establishing contact, we would use Google Street view to calculate an estimate, and then provide that estimate to the client either by phone, or by email. The window patterns of most houses are fairly similar when you really break them down, so we never concerned ourselves with driving out to a client’s residence for an estimate. Here again, driving out to perform estimates takes time, and, as previously stated, time is money. After the sale, sold or not, all of the client’s information was input into Google Sheets and colour coded according to the status of the contract. Contracts coded in a certain colour were considered ‘live’, and allocated to a team through shared Google Calendars. Clients would be informed of a two-week time frame whereby we would have the contract completed, and, once the contract was completed, an additional structure was placed into the calendar so that teams could update the homebase in real time. At that point, someone would make contact with the client to verify the quality of our service, restate our policies, and finally, collect on the contract. Our ability to thrive in that environment relied on reducing the amount of time it takes to manage each process, while simultaneously increasing the capacity of any process for which increasing the capacity of that process was an applicable goal. Digital structure is permanent, fast, integrated, and easier to organize than non-digital structure. (Warschauer, 2003; WIlliams, 2012) By leveraging affordances through the media we selected, we were able to develop the necessary technologies to enhance our use of time, becoming literate in running a business for having mastered its technological processes.

Now, I’m not going to get into any complicated justifications about my overt use of the ‘time is money’ paradigm. I realize that schools aren’t out to make a buck, and I understand that the cultural requirements of a school are different than those of a business. I think it’s even fair to suggest that not all schools will share the same cultural requirements either, just as not all businesses do. I will argue, though, that both schools and businesses are out to raise capital in one form or another, and that raising capital requires labour. That premise established, I cite ‘An Inquiry into the Causes of the Wealth of Nations’, by Adam Smith (1776), to suggest that money is simply a denotation of labour, and thus, the expression ‘time is money’ simply means that time spent represents a form of labour. Reducing time as a form of overhead is a critical feature of the cultural requirements of running a business, one of those requirements being the efficiency of labour. Now, compare that with the story I’m about to tell you. My hope is that you can see how eliminating the cultural requirement of efficient labour from the context of performing work has a serious impact on the results of this project.

The scenario is that, a school I worked at wanted to assess the reading level of every student in the school. This was a large school, so the magnitude of the task was fairly high. There was a team of three teachers running the project, and by a reasonable estimate, it would take about 30 hours to assess a grade level. My math is eight hours for each of the literacy teachers, plus an additional two hours in support from each homeroom teacher, averaged out to three homeroom teachers at any given grade level, and then doubled to account for the school being bilingual. Three teachers at eight hours each is 24, plus three homeroom teachers at two hours each is six, therefore, 30 hours per grade. Five grades assessed is 150 hours, which we’ll multiply by two to account for the bilingual environment. All in, about 300 hours. Challenge the math if you want, it’s the point of the story that I’m after. After 300 labour hours by the school in assessing the reading level of every student, the teachers presented the information in the form of sticky notes on large white chart paper and suggested that we take pictures of it. Really? But wait, there’s more. When I challenged the principal on the frivolity of the medium that was selected, the response was something like: ‘not everyone was as technologically proficient as I was.’ Really, really? Now, maybe you’ve had a few experiences like this in the past. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not always right, but sometimes I just need an employee to do what I ask, and that employee and I can talk about it later. But it was hard to swallow the ignorance of that response. Then, to top it all off, about two weeks after ‘the Sticky Note Incident’ (note, for the timeline, that my discussion with this principal actually occured after this last piece of the anecdote), we had a PD day where another team of three teachers basically spent three hours getting a whole school of teachers to put yet more sticky notes on chart paper, and then take more pictures of it. My mind was blown. Here I was, coming from a business culture rooted in developing efficiency through the planned alignment of digital technologies within digital mediums, being told that such a skill set would be irrelevant by a school administrator who was okay with putting sticky notes on chart paper. Twice.

But, regardless of how disappointed I was at the outcome of this situation, I’m not trying to relive the past through this guidebook. As I mentioned earlier, it’s the contrast between our relative cultures that I wanted to highlight. What this story represents is two distinct understandings of the purpose of digital literacy. On the one hand, we have an example of a company that was able to employ digital literacy to enhance output and increase their capital by reducing the amount of unpaid labour inherent in running a business, through the media selected to run that business. On the other hand, we have a noble attempt at developing knowledge capital about the reading levels of students, but with a number of severe limitations based on the relationship of the cultural requirements of that capital, namely, that it be both accessible and delivered within a relevant time frame, to the media selected. It failed on both requirements, and cost the school a significant amount of labour that could have been spent more productively. This is why the cultural relationship of literacy to media is important to consider in developing a pedagogy for its instruction. It’s not enough to take a picture of some work by a student, post it into a digital portfolio, and claim that you’ve taught digital literacy. Digitally literate teachers need to consider what students are being prepared for, and then backwards design from there to meet the needs of their students where they are now, and this isn’t always easy. The next part of this book looks at the purpose of digital literacy, and why, based on that purpose, the idea of building a pedagogy centred on teaching technological affordances through epistemic games sounds so promising. Let’s dive in!

Setting the Stage

An article that interested me while researching this guidebook was called “Digital Competence—From Education Policy to Pedagogy: The Norwegian Context”, by Morten Søby (2008). The article provides an in depth look at a digital literacy curriculum in action in Norway. It was interesting because several sources indicated that Norway was not only a frontrunner in developing policy and pedagogy around ‘digital literacy’, but because they also want to be seen as a frontrunner in this capacity as well, making them a very competitive culture at pursuing research as a result. The digital world is highly culturally relevant in Norway, and the inclusion of Norway’s cultural and commercial diversity as part of its vision of future learning is key in the Norwegian educational system’s ability to use present day digital tools and knowledge to prepare their students for tomorrow’s challenges. In 2006, the country implemented the Knowledge Promotion Reform, which was designed to increase the knowledge and basic skills of all Norwegian students. A major component of this reform was the inclusion of digital skills, which the curriculum defined as a ‘basic skill’, making Norway the first country in Europe with a curriculum directly based on digital skills. Following a vision of “digital competence for everyone” (p. 120), the program offers “new, ambitious national targets and priorities” (Morten Søby, 2008, p.120), while leaning on four major objectives: 1) Norwegian educational institutions should have access to high-quality infrastructure and services in 2008; 2) digital competence will be central to education at all levels in 2008; 3) the Norwegian education system should be among the best in the world in this area by 2008; and 4) ICT should be an integral policy instrument for innovation and quality development in Norwegian education in 2008.

At this point, things get hazy, and I’m going to stop this guidebook short of making too many direct curricular suggestions, suffice to agree with holding ICT as an ‘integral policy instrument for innovation’, and that I would also add data architecture, digital graphical manipulation, and cloud-based applications to that list, as other, foundational areas in digital literacy. The reason why things get hazy here is because, one way or another, you’ll still have to plan your lessons against a curriculum that may not be as culturally relevant as it should be, and that will be challenging because you’ll have to justify ways that current curricular objectives actually do meet the cognitive objectives for training digital literacy, but with very little guidance. This could also be professionally risky under the wrong circumstances, so feel out the context at your school before you go getting a class full of eighth graders to build an identity website using HTML and a Notepad application on the school computers. I understand, as I’m writing this, that certain schools in certain boards have started teaching ‘coding’, which is encouraging. Look for these schools, since they are trying to bridge the digital gap. As I haven’t witnessed any of these classes myself, I’ll withhold any judgement at all, suffice to suggest two things for any administrators who may be reading this: 1) Coding is not the entirety of digital literacy. I would try to avoid that trap at all costs. And 2) I’ve never actually felt it was either necessary, or even a good idea to open up a new curriculum just to teach a unique branch of digital literacy. This practice may become redundant very quickly (Buckingham, 2010), and I actually believe the threshold concepts method is a better basis for digital literacy within a school for various reasons that I’ll get into in the next section. I also want to point out that, while my business may be a strong example for connecting cultural relevance to digital literacy, it is, by far, not the only paradigm worth addressing. Student identity and building student capital are areas that many schools are already looking into, and your abilities as a digital leader may put you at an advantage here. First, ask yourself how you can make raising student capital the cultural focus of your classroom? Next, form your basis of inquiry by aligning your media to the cultural focus you choose, based on intelligent lesson design. You won’t be perfect, but if this were a ‘time is money’ scenario, how would you go about it? What’s important in becoming a digital leader isn’t just planning with a digital medium. Anyone can do that by signing out a laptop cart. Your purpose is planning why you’re using a particular digital medium, and then how you can impart the technologies which inform the basis of literacy for that medium to your class.

The Case for Good Grammar

I mentioned earlier that I was going to stop short of making any direct curricular suggestions, and I hope, by now, that you’re starting to get a feel for why. Undertaking that process would be both massive, and probably futile. I also mentioned in the previous paragraph that I prefer teaching digital literacy through threshold concepts rather than creating new definitions to teach specific elements of digital literacy, and I want to get into that further here to show you what I mean. Let’s take a digital language like HTML, and break it down a little to see how various pieces of it fit together and relate to non-digital languages. I wrote the next section for you in both HTML and in English so that you could fire it up on a laptop and see it for yourself (follow the instructions in Appendix: A for assistance). What I want you to see here is that, if you look at digital languages as being separate to the languages that a student would normally learn in school, than they look pretty tricky and complicated, and have a tendency to worry people for those reasons. However, if you look at all languages as the employment of linguistic technologies to perform work, then digital languages don’t look so big and bad anymore. They’re just versions of languages which already exist, but which are ultimately designed for use within a digital environment. A means to an end; no more, no less. Let’s do a quick grammar lesson, teacher, so I can show you what I mean.

So, HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language, and it’s one of the primary languages used for placing content on a server to be viewed through a web browser. To put that less technically, you use HTML to make websites. At its most basic level, the language incorporates tags that become elements to ‘markup’ a normal language so that a web browser (Firefox, Safari, Chrome, etc…) displays the text that’s written, but in the manner in which the text is ‘marked up’. Here’s how it works:

As you can see, there really isn’t that much that I’m adding here. The open and closed triangle brackets (<> followed by at the end) form the tag, while placing the code for a specific element inside a tag applies that element to whatever text sits in between those open and closed triangle brackets. The entire process is not unlike how we resolve brackets in math, for a point of reference. The threshold concept here is that, web browsers can read ‘markup’ text, and that, by changing whatever tag is ‘marking up’ some text, we can change the outcome of how the web browser displays what it reads. The technology in this example is the tags first, then the elements second, since they do the work within the context of displaying the information on a browser. This makes the knowledge of how this construct works the literacy. Now, let’s compare this to something many of you will be familiar with: English grammar.

Here are the first two lines of one of the most powerful chapters in all of English literature: A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens; chapter 45. “Long the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrils carry the day's wine to La Guillotine. All the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in the one realisation, Guillotine.” (Dickens, 1859) The full chapter is still a tear jerker for me, and I would argue that Sydney Carton is the bravest character in the entire British Cannon for the sacrifice he commits. But I’m not into spoilers, so you’ll have to read the book for yourself to judge. You probably don’t realize how many technologies are actually in this passage, since most people tend to recognize linguistic conventions without realizing how many of them are actually grammatical technologies. See the capital letters that start the sentences? That is a technology to inform the reader that a new sentence has begun. Those periods are also a technology. They inform the reader that a thought has been written to its completion. See the comma after the word streets? You guessed it, another technology. That’s there because English sentence structure follows a subject / predicate form, and, based on the rules, prepositional phrases are written in the predicate. This one is written outside of the predicate, but since it can’t form part of the subject, it is left outside of both, as the prepositional phrase it is, but denoted by a comma ahead of the subject to separate the two. I’ll even award that second comma right afterwards the title of ‘technology’ as well, but I’ll also qualify that in suggesting that, as a technology, it isn’t there because of the rules, but to apply them instead. It forces the reader to follow the normal convention for a comma, i.e. pausing, but is in that particular spot to create space between words, rather than fulfill any syntactic role. In this sense, it is an example of English literacy because it is an example of the author applying knowledge of English technological conventions to perform work, but through a non-standard construct.

There’s another example of this technique in action within the passage that I selected, so let’s shift off of that second comma and focus on the construct that I chose this passage for: La Guillotine. There’s something different about the use of the capital letters naming ‘La Guillotine’ than the use of capital letters at other points in the passage: ‘La Guillotine’ doesn’t start a sentence. But that’s okay, there’s another reason to use capital letters in English, and that’s to denote a proper noun, which is exactly what’s happening here. If ou’ve read ‘A Tale of Two Cities’, or studied history more generally, you know that the guillotine was utterly central to both the novel, and to the French Revolution itself. In the novel, with Madame Defarge quietly knitting the fates of all those aristocrates, it represents the God force of the French revolution. The only tool left by which the people could restore political balance to their country. The reader naturally understands this because they’ve been taught since their earliest days of school that a capital letter is used for either a new sentence, or a proper noun, so the metaphor is readily apparent. What Dickens did to achieve this metaphor was to employ a grammatical technology that would create an understanding in the reader that ‘La Guillotine’ was to be seen as a personified force, not just a device for execution. If what I’ve been saying about threshold concepts up until now is true, then we should also be able to employ technologies within the HTML example, similarly to how Dickens uses them in A Tale of Two Cities, to alter how the reader perceives ‘La Guillotine’ in that language as well, and indeed we can.

The threshold concept for this example would go something like this: All languages are essentially constructed from the technological conventions which form that language. Literacy is knowledge of a set of technologies which allow a user to perform work within any mediums for which that set of technologies applies. (Schlechty, 2008) This means that any medium can be taught by acknowledging the technologies which inform the literacy for that medium. In the larger sense, however, this last point also serves my previous argument, that teaching ‘digital literacy’ in isolation is not only pointless, but a questionable pedagogical approach as well. As we’ve seen, the culture defines the medium (Johnson, 2016), not the other way around (there are rare examples where a medium emerges which is strong enough to fundamentally alter the culture of one or more societal groups (certain, wide reaching social media sites, for example), but I’m not getting into that phenomenon within this report). Essentially, what I’m saying is, to suggest that you can teach a particular medium honours the culture under which that medium is relevant, as well as all of the individual technologies that apply to that medium, and inform its literacy. Conversely, to claim that you can teach ‘digital literacy’ in general completely ignores the relationship between media, and the technologies which perform work within those media. Does that make sense? Following this point of view, you’re better off teaching ‘digital literacy’ as an amalgamation of technologies, strung together through threshold concepts, and employed within a range of media. From there pick your medium, and then align your technologies into a relevant literacy for that medium using some of the techniques that we’ve discussed. It’s fair to say that both Excel and HTML, as languages, are too far apart to teach in the same class. But, do you remember what I was saying about fractions? If you use that principle to build the core literacy for either Excel or HTML, eventually, you’ll come to recognize that they aren’t so far apart based on the cultural rationale behind how they’ve each developed.

Now, let’s go back to my business to see what this actually looks like by pointing out a few features from my example to highlight what I’ve been talking about. First, note that not every technology we employed in our business was digital in nature. One was analogue (the phone), while another was conceptual (employees on a week long overview, and clients being given a two week window for when the project would be complete). This is because, in the cultural context of running a business, these technologies proved either sufficient, or more effective than their digital versions would have been. Remember this point. There is a difference between techno-love, and techno-lust (Graham, 2013), and deliberately incorporating digital media into a lesson just for the sake of it can be as ineffective as withholding digital media where and when they’re appropriate. In the digital world, not all that glitters is gold, and the essential purpose of teaching digital literacy is to provide students with the confidence to make intelligent choices regarding their digital needs, relative to their personal cultures. his comes from the purposeful exposure of students to planned digital affordances for the purpose of developing the student’s digital zone of proximal development, which we’ll talk about next!

Let the Games Begin!

Let’s face it. No proper guide to teaching digital literacy would be complete without at least talking about video games, and why the concept of using video games to help teach students seems so promising. Plus, your guide just so happens to be an avid gamer, so I would regret going to all of the trouble of writing up a guide to teaching digital literacy without talking about using games as a focus for that instruction at least once, right? Video games can be amazing artifacts for teaching skills through a digital medium, and, to an extent, teaching digital literacy. That said, I want to preface this discussion with a word of caution: Video games are not the ‘cure all’ for teaching digital literacy, and there are a couple of pieces that have to be in place for the idea of teaching through a game to work as a type of pedagogy. This is the final piece of the puzzle, teacher, and with it, I believe that you’ll have every tool you’ll need to become an effective digital instructor. Ready?

I recently restarted an old teenage favourite of mine called Baldur’s Gate. Look it up if you want, but Baldur’s Gate I and Baldur’s Gate II are both widely considered two of the top ten role playing games (RPGs) of all time, and, personally, I agree. (Retrieved: here) Their storyline is phenomenal, they are both generally nonlinear (this was still pretty revolutionary back in 1998 and 2000), and they could each take up days of your time, giving a player plenty of opportunity to settle in and really get a feel for the game. But none of those are the reason why I love the Baldur’s Gate series so much. I love it because I can crack it. Now, hear me out here. I don’t mean cheat at it. Anyone can do that; just Google it. I mean crack it, and what I’m talking about is that, I know how that game works well enough that I can use features of how it works in one sense to leverage advantages in completely different areas of the game. That’s cracking a game. This might seem pointless to you, and I get that. You might not appreciate what I’m getting at without a background in gamer culture, but for the digitally literate, sometimes beating a game is no longer enough. Some of us play games to beat the developers who make them. This is the level of comprehension that you’re looking for in your students. The problem is achieving this level of comprehension in general digital literacy, not just gamer culture, and definitely not just with a specific game. Let me throw you one last story to help explain.

This restriction seriously affects lesson design, as it should. It can be challenging enough to find developmentally appropriate material within the digital environment, depending on your teaching context. To have to then vet that material afterwords, prove that it imparts an appropriate lesson with a measurable outcome, and then relate it all to specific curricular expectations can be a nightmare. Fear not, teacher. I have a few more tricks up my sleeve to help you solve this piece of the puzzle. The strategy that I want to impart on you is about teaching digital affordances to help your students understand the nature of various structures within the digital environment (Gibson, 1979). While teaching affordances doesn’t mean that every single lesson you impart is directly based on mastering the digital environment of a particular medium, it does require a degree of knowledge and mastery that exceeds simply handing out a class set of laptops or ipads as a research aid, and hoping for the best. As an instructor of digital literacy, you need to understand the relationship between perception and affordances, (Gibson, 1979; Norman, 1999) as well as develop an ability to plan or design learning opportunities by manipulating where the cognitive load in a given activity sits in relation to the affordances that you’re trying to teach your students to perceive (Sweller et al., 1998). Let me explain.

We ran a few tests to generate rules, then we tested the rules we developed to see if it was actually a rule, or just logic that worked well in a particular context. Finally, we learned the secret. We were missing a piece of the puzzle, and we had to integrate another technology to solve the problem. Eventually, we got the rule to read like this: ‘Press control’ (a technology for selecting multiple objects, ‘Press’ is a different command than ‘Click’, it refers to buttons on the keyboard, not icons on the screen), then, ‘Click’ each object you want to select (we knew we were cooking with fire when starting the sequence with ‘Press control’ allowed us to ‘Click’ multiple objects hrough the ‘Mousegrid’. We had not achieved that with any previous combination), then ‘Mark’ the folder or location where you want to move the files, and finally, ‘Drag’ the files into the marked location. It seems like quite the process, but it works like a charm compared to individually moving each file across a desktop. As I said earlier, this is the level of comprehension that you’re looking for in your students, but achieving it in relevant learning outcomes is quite complicated. To the point where, if you’re targeting a learning outcome that isn’t directly related to a curricular expectation, you might as well not even bother.

This restriction seriously affects lesson design, as it should. It can be challenging enough to find developmentally appropriate material within the digital environment, depending on your teaching context. To have to then vet that material afterwords, prove that it imparts an appropriate lesson with a measurable outcome, and then relate it all to specific curricular expectations can be a nightmare. Fear not, teacher. I have a few more tricks up my sleeve to help you solve this piece of the puzzle. The strategy that I want to impart on you is about teaching digital affordances to help your students understand the nature of various structures within the digital environment (Gibson, 1979). While teaching affordances doesn’t mean that every single lesson you impart is directly based on mastering the digital environment of a particular medium, it does require a degree of knowledge and mastery that exceeds simply handing out a class set of laptops or ipads as a research aid, and hoping for the best. As an instructor of digital literacy, you need to understand the relationship between perception and affordances, (Gibson, 1979; Norman, 1999) as well as develop an ability to plan or design learning opportunities by manipulating where the cognitive load in a given activity sits in relation to the affordances that you’re trying to teach your students to perceive (Sweller et al., 1998). Let me explain.

Affordances are actionable properties between the world and an actor (Gibson, 1979). They are, essentially, the things that you can do within a given environment, and they affect how people understand that environment as an agent within it. In a computing sense, keys can be pressed, and the mouse can be clicked. They are both affordances. Constraints are the exact opposite of affordances, and provide feedback in the sense of impossibility in the same way that affordances provide feedback as a sense of possibility. An example of a constraint is that, while the mouse can be moved anywhere by the user, it is limited by the length of the wire attaching it to the computer. For ease, I will refer to both affordances and constraints as affordances for the rest of this guidebook. I’m doing this to avoid confusion, so, while I suspect that more people will readily grasp the importance of affordances to digital literacy than constraints, understand that they are both equally important, and can be seen as two sides to the same coin. As a digital instructor, your task is to teach the technologies that we’ve been discussing by informing your students of, and then training your students to use the natural affordances that a digital environment you selected provides. You can do this by placing the cognitive load of your lesson directly on mastering the affordances that you will use to impart the technology that you’re trying to teach. (Sweller et al., 1998) I’ll give you an example. Let’s go back to word processors for a second, as they provide the user with a number of unique affordances, some of which are more obvious than others. We’ll start with some of the obvious ones. First, you can type letters, and the letters that you type on the keyboard show up on the screen. Second, you can structure a document by modifying the words and styles that you use to produce new words and styles. Third, you can save the document, and retrieve your work with ease at a later time. Note that there are a large number of technologies that could be trained through ozens of affordances within and surrounding the use of a word processor, but we’ll keep this to the three I’ve mentioned for now, to serve as an example. As a digital instructor, your task is to isolate the technologies that you want to teach, line them up against mediums which will require those technologies (this requires a fundamental understanding of how a particular medium works), and then design a lesson where the students’ interaction with the natural affordances of the digital medium they are working in successfully places the cognitive load of that learning opportunity as close to the target technology as possible; with opportunities to differentiate, and then move about the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978) if need be. That’s not easy at first, but it’s also not as complicated as it sounds, once you get used to the process. Let’s take a second to talk about how we can plan some student interactions around the affordances of a word processor to teach a few technologies.

The affordance we’ll target is that, with any word processor, you can type words, and the words that you type on the keyboard show up on the screen for an indeterminate period of time. (Williams, 2012) This might seem redundantly simple, but there are actually a number of technologies to train with this. Let’s stick with two of the more obvious ones: spelling technologies, and typing technologies. Here’s a small list of things you can do with a word processor to train spelling and typing:

Anyways, those are just a few quick ideas, but I wanted you to see how I think to understand how important lesson design is to digital instruction. I also wanted to highlight some of those practices so that you could see that I’m not really changing anything that you aren’t already doing, I’m just doing it through a digital medium to train students from a digital angle. The other thing I wanted you to see was that the lessons I described are all trainable lessons. This means that, the same way you might prepare a class to manage some it’s own non-digital learning responsibilities, such as training for literacy programs, finding right fit books, buddy reading, or whatever other responsibilities you prepare students for, you can train students to teach themselves digital literacy. It’s as simple as booking a laptop cart each week and working it into the learning opportunities that you already plan on a daily basis. Furthermore, as you improve this process on your own terms, look for ways that you can collaborate with your coworkers to help put systems in place to develop technologies in students as they are growing. Technology teams are a great venue for this, but be careful in how you structure them. I’ve seen these teams under many lights. In some cases, the team is truly devoted to digital literacy, and is able to push an entire school in that direction through the magic they weave. In many other situations, however, I’ve seen technology teams composed of amateurs looking to engage in school culture, which, while noble, is utterly disorganized, and not likely to produce significant results. In either case, a smart goal for a digital literacy team to work on is developing digital conventions. Schools could pick a target medium, break it down, and then build it back up into a stable, cohesive concept that can be taught over the course of a student’s career within a particular scholastic environment. One technique I’d like to suggest as a viable method for developing both digital literacy and digital capital within a school is to use what are called epistemic games, which I’ll describe next.

On his website, Goodyear (2007) describes epistemic fluency as ‘the capacity to understand, switch between, and combine different kinds of knowledge and different ways of knowing about the world (retrieved: here). Despite the article being written in support of university level education, I feel that the principle behind using epistemic activity to develop epistemic fluency in higher education is very relevant to developing digital literacy in general. The reason for this has to do with the sheer complexity of what it means to be digitally literate in today’s world, and whether traditional methods of education will actually accomplish this goal on a massive scale. David Williamson Shaffer, a game scientist at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research and the principal of EFGames, LLC, refutes this in stating that “the epistemology of School is the epistemology of the Industrial Revolution — of creating wealth through mass production of standardized goods. School is a game about thinking like a factory worker. It is a game with an epistemology of right and wrong answers in which students are supposed to follow instructions, whether they make sense in the moment or not.” (Shaffer, 2006, p.37) This type of thinking doesn’t work in teaching digital literacy. For sure, there are right and wrong answers, but only in the sense of how an input is executed, rarely in the sense of what that execution is actually for. To put that more simply, think of it this way. It’s not just a matter of knowing how to build something anymore. The internet changed that whole era for us. Now it’s a matter of knowing how to build something well enough that a student can use the principles of what they know how to build in the creation of something that hasn’t been built yet. This is far different than the standardization of the industrial era.

I believe that epistemic games are excellent for this type of knowledge construction, because they provide a relevant, cultural context to explore key ideas in the digital world, through media that would actually be authentic in the lives students are being prepared for. Once again, Shaffer refutes this belief in confirming that: “In playing games, [students] are doing explicitly, openly and socially what as adults they will do tacitly, privately and personally. They are running simulations of worlds they want to learn about in order to understand the rules, roles and consequences of those worlds.” Furthermore, epistemic games support current trends towards project-based and collaborative learning. In another article, by Goodyear and Zenios (2007), they suggest that a strong element of epistemic learning is that it enables student collaboration in authentic knowledge-creation activities. This, coupled with a growing sense of oneself as a legitimate and valued member of a knowledge-building community, is essential to the development of an effective knowledge-worker (Goodyear, 2007). They also suggest that discussion has a central role in collaborative knowledge- building, and in epistemic activity more generally, pointing out that, like sports, people get better at playing epistemic games by playing with people who are already better at it than they are. This means that engagement in collaborative knowledge-building about digital literacy through epistemic games is likely to produce effective knowledge-workers as a result.

Now, relating all of this back to our earlier discussion of video games in learning, it’s not actually viable to find an appropriate game, in the sense of an application which is downloaded and used as an interactive learning activity, for teaching absolutely every possible facet of either digital literacy, or even the curriculum in general. In fact, mapping out video games against specific curriculums, in my opinion, is more of a headache then it’s worth, especially given everything else that your average teacher is usually responsible for in a given day. But, fear not, because this is where the magic happens. It turns out that students are amazing at making up their own games. Use this to your advantage. Using threshold concepts as a type of conceptual mapping tool for a guided mastery-based approach, you can use the idea of playing epistemic games with your class as a lesson focus designed to produce mastery within the individual zones of development it would take to master, in relative terms, a particular medium. How? By controlling the environment. This is in line with Lakhana’s (2014) view of how people learn technologies through inquiry, as she quotes Dewey in suggesting “that tools are carried into the continuity of experience and transformed through controlled inquiry. Knowledge itself, including conceptual definitions, can be seen as a tool that comes alive through the process of inquiry. Furthermore, the process of inquiry can be understood as technological in that it utilizes, activates, and refashions prior knowledge.” (Lakhana, 2014, p. 5) Essentially, you, the teacher, build the sandbox, and you fill it with all the affordances that students will use to design technologies. Next, you explain the mission, and you teach your students what they need to know in order to get started, but then, right at the point of releasing responsibility, you let it ride, so to speak. If the lesson is designed well, and the learning outcome is a clear and reasonably attainable goal, you have just achieved student-centred, play-based learning within a digital environment. If they assess well, great, if not, oh well. Put the lesson back into your big bag of tricks, move on, and plan another angle to get those thresholds taught. Rinse and repeat. Change the angle, but never the concept. Does that make sense?

Now, this is where the school’s technology team should start their planning. In the type of activity described above, we have mastery of individual threshold concepts happening within varied zones of proximal development, enhanced by collaboration from students in other, related zones of proximal development, all of which are situated at varying levels throughout the program. This is then enhanced by a goal-driven approach to the purpose of digital literacy as a whole, seeing mastery over the entire system, modelled as closely as possible to that system’s use within the natural environment, as its ultimate focus (Goodyear & Zenios, 2007). This would force students to use the skills and resources acquired from all previous levels of epistemic gaming in the production and development of epistemic capital, all centered around a school culture devoted to the mastery of one or more digital systems. Technology teams within schools can use this as the core engine for student learning, but, simultaneously start developing opportunities to link the various threshold concepts they uncover across the grades, similar to how I connected fractions earlier, to expand the range of what they are able to provide as a whole school, or even a whole board; though organization to that degree is likely easier said than done.

Well, we got there. We went down the rabbit hole and broke through several layers of reality in the process, but we made it. So what d’you think? I hope you took something from all of that, but I realize it’s difficult to take it all in. For now, try to focus on the major highlights, and keep your planning to a few basic steps to help develop the technologies your students will need for more expansive projects. As you can see, while the research is abundant, it can be both vague, and scattered. Developing coherent digital pedagogy on a massive scale will require teachers who are able to quickly master subtle nuances and observations within digital environments, while simultaneously navigating systemic and political issues within school environments, to try and deliver optimal learning opportunities for the next generation of students. Are you still up for it?

Part of my rationale for writing this guidebook is to help consolidate what I know how to do, with the information currently available, so that people will have an easier time building digitally relevant lessons for their students. While it isn’t perfect, I find the idea of viewing literacy itself as a group of technologies more accurate than trying to create a specific ‘digital literacy’. This makes teaching the concept of digital literacy more mechanical and less mystical, and I believe that’s a better pedagogy than trying to pick and pull at a plethora of concepts surrounding digital media, but without really digging into any of them. The other reason for writing about the concept of digital literacy to this depth is to point out that schools and school boards may not be as well positioned as they would like for acquiring refined digital pedagogies. This is largely due to a lack of focus around the particular cultural elements which define different media within our society, and the fact that schools, in large part, are not under enough direct cultural competition to acquire this focus. What you choose to do with this information is up to you, but this entrepreneur is off to the open market. Online learning is a $255 billion dollar industry, and growing. To each their own, but that’s a big pie to grab a slice of, and with easy scaling, the ability to develop permanent capital, and the freedom to teach what we want, and how we want to teach it, it’s easy to see why the industry is growing.

I’m not trying to write this guidebook as a form of social commentary (at least not overtly); but as an amateur economist, I will speculate that, for public education, digital literacy will remain frustratingly elusive, the digital divide will continue to widen, and a far-reaching market, just on the fringes of public education, will continue to develop and proliferate as long as our current systems don’t change. Personally, I’m okay with this, but I suspect that it will take a while for many people to realize that schools are not well designed to keep pace with the free market, and that they should probably stop advertising the instruction of subject matter in which they are that far behind the cutting edge of innovation. But, that’s just my opinion on the matter. I wrote this to help you, so that’s how we’ll leave it.

Teacher, the issues in teaching digital literacy are numerous, and it’s not worth jeopardizing your career by reaching too far, too fast. Look for schools that are already into some of the concepts that we’ve talked about here, and help them expand on their processes through ideas such as epistemic games, and creating culturally relevant learning opportunities (Søby, 2011). You can help these schools develop some of their own conventions, or even help them see certain connections to advance them on their journey.

As for your students, continue to build the awesome lessons that you do; just keep an eye on training digital literacies as well, and remember to stay patient with people who are still learning your pedagogy. It will take time for people to acclimatize to what we’re talking about, and that’s okay. Most students get ample time on digital products in their lives, so even concepts and ideas can be useful in helping your students develop digital literacy. And as for yourself, stay true to your course. You’ve come this far already, and it would be a shame to turn back. The road ahead will always be difficult for people like us, because we’re the trailblazers, and that involves going against the norm sometimes. We’ve talked about a number of reasons why the road you’re on is potentially unsafe, so try to take care of yourself on your travels. Remember what we’re fighting for, and wear the mantle well. Thank you.

- Ryan Degen, MEd