The Horizon Project
The Horizon Project is dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies. The Critical Challenges outlined in 2011 executive summary, examined emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in teaching, learning, and creative inquiry. The one Critical Challenge that education currently faces is summed up by the following statement. "Digital media literacy continues to rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession." Then we ask, "What is Digital Media Literacy and Why is it Important in Education?" "Digital Literacy" is a term that comes out of the fact that the internet has changed our world so drastically. Digital literacy is sometimes confused with technological literacy. Technology literacy is the understanding of how to use a computer. So when we think about research - it's more than knowing how to open a browser and Google a term. Digital Literacy when used with one's ability to access information becomes the act of continually identifying, selecting, and sharing the best and most relevant digital information within an interest domain.
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Digital Literacy Redefined
The Ministry of Education in British Columbia defines digital literacy as “the interest, attitude and ability of individuals to appropriately use digital technology and communication tools to access, manage, integrate, analyze and evaluate information, construct new knowledge, create and communicate with others in order to participate effectively in society”. This idea of digital literacy is not founded on theory; it is founded in practice, something that education cannot package with programs based on educational theory. We now have a new model that is shifting away from informational delivery to informational construction. Access to information is no longer enclosed in the covers of texted filled manuscripts to be read by the lecture. Everyday students, and information gathers are building and sharing resources through the consumption of a free flow of information that replicates new chunks of information within millisecond. A new generation of social publishers are creating vast warehouses of information, digital content that is merged, and remixed into a new forms of conceptual awareness. This is the generation that will create, publish and formulate new meanings of the world in which they live, virtually and semantically.
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The new challenge for education is in information consumption as literacy is redefined through connected learning experiences and in ways that students access the vast warehouses of digital content.Education will need to face these challenges by redefining the process of web found knowledge into best practices on how to access, curate and create content that will enhance 21st Century learning skills. This process is what defines digital literacy: the set of skills needed to collaboratively collect information from multiple sources, decipher and reduce shared information into segments of exactness, and reshape information into multimedia products that become new ideas with deeper meaning. Barbara R. Jones-Kavalier and Suzanne L. Flannigan: in an article post entitled Connecting the Digital Dots: Literacy of the 21st Century; defined digital literacy as; "A person's ability to perform tasks effectively in a digital environment ... Literacy includes the ability to read and interpret media, to reproduce data and images through digital manipulation, and to evaluate and apply new knowledge gained from digital environments."