Thriving in the 21st century: Learning Literacies for the Digital Age (LLiDA project)

Learning Literacies for the Digital Age

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/projects/llidareportjune2009.pdf

"The texture of social life is changing, with more and more people conducting and sustaining relationships via digital media. Many social practices, from purchasing to voting to registering for healthcare, can now be conducted online. In its recent statement on Digital Britain‘, the Government expresses an active intention to enhance this trend, and lists media literacies and IT skills‘ second only after access to the internet as a requirement for building a society of empowered and informed consumers and citizens".

Trends shaping technology and community, from Wenger et al (2005), are:

• Fabric of connectivity – always on, virtual presence
• Modes of engagement – generalised self-expression, mass collaboration, creative re-appropriation
• Active medium – social computing, semantic web, digital footprint
• Reconfigured geographies – homesteading of the web, individualisation of orientation
• Modulating polarities – togetherness and separation, interacting and publishing, individual and group
• Dealing with multiplicity – competing services, multi-membership, thin connections
• New communities – multi-space, multi-scale, dynamic boundaries, social learning spaces.