Digital Literacy: Effective Use Of Technologies

Does digital media have a positive or negative effect on the younger generations?

Discuss about the Digital Literacy Effective Use of the Technologies.

The skills, knowledge, and behaviors used in digital devices like tablets, smartphones, desktops, and laptops are known as digital literacy. Originally, digital literacy is the ability of the population to make effective use of the technologies that are exposed to them. To cope up with the contemporary global environment, one should be digitally literate. Nowadays multimedia has found its importance in popular and professional uses. With the popularization of the media in the economy, it has become very necessary to increase media literacy among the masses of the population. Media literacy should be taught in schools, colleges, etc.  Digital literacy at present has made a distinct space in the commercial environment mainly because of non-instrumental purposes like relation-maintenance, entertainment, communication, self- expression. The digital literacy helps one to utilize technology to interact with the world around them and thus make them a digital citizen. In the busy life of today's world, digital literacy helps people to communicate with the family and friends on a regularly. Not only to do white collar jobs but also to do blue collar jobs like understanding market and increase productivity, digital literacy is required. Thus digital literacy increases job security. So the digital literacy should be promoted more systematically in public education. To make a valuable contribution to the further development of digital literacy the schools have to change their way of education then only they can expect the change in the teens. The main thing which must be modified in the school is the teachers. Today most of the Australian teenagers are electronically well informed, because they are the most educated and most globally aware generation ever. They are optimistic, they have money, and they are pragmatic about studying.

John Howkins said that IT alone is not enough to drive the economic and social advancement of the present time. To become creative one should be sceptical, agrumentative, maintain originality and occasionally downright negative (Hartley 2009). According to the sociologist, Richard Florida the creative class will dominate the cultural and economic life in the recent centuries (Apple 2013.). Just like the working class which was predominant in the early decades of twenty centuries and after that service class. However, the creative is smaller than service class. Musician, artist, scientist, professor have always set their own hours. They can never be forced to do work (Lingo, et al. 2013 pp.337-363.). The workplace environment is changing from the blue collar and white collar to no collar. The no-collar workplace is replacing the traditional hierarchical system of control with new forms of peer- recognition, self-management and intrinsic forms of motivation, which is referred to as soft control. The standardization of work experience is achieved by high unionization of the industrial organization of workforce. The people of nowadays are facing particular economic circumstances and future generation also have to make their way out through these circumstances. So it is crucial to change the style of the education system. Otherwise, the future generation will be unable to cope up with the challenges of the 21^st century (Self et al. 2013 pp. 117-127).

Is building digital literacy in remote communities of Australia necessary?

Nowadays it is very normal to find a 2yrs old child to be a master in photographers with their parent’s Smartphone camera and 6yrs old child who type faster than most developers do. Nowadays the teachers use technology and media as an invaluable teaching tool in the classrooms (Nielsen et al. 2013). But a small portion of people believes that incorporating tablets in the classroom would distract the student from learning. Teachers and adults are no longer the only sources of knowledge the children interact among themselves and are motivated to find out more from each other than from adults. As a result, they make friends with people all over the world, which is not possible without technological advances. The kids become more considerate, emphatic and relationship-oriented due to the social network. Kids nowadays remember the birthdays and greet them, which is an outcome of the social network (Factor 2014). However, there are some adverse effects of the social network. The overuse of technology and social media has a negative effect on the health children, teenagers, and preteen by making them more prone to depression, anxiety and other psychological disorders, and thus making them more susceptible to the health-related problem in future. Studies proved that the teen is addicted to maintaining more than one account on social media network. There are hundreds or thousands of fake account on social networks who are boys pretending to be girls to make friendship with girls but this result in disappointments and embarrassments that ultimately result in Facebook depression. There is a trend of competition among the teens that who have uploaded more pictures, who is getting more likes, and who receives more friend request this make the new generation more obsessed towards social media so they cannot arrange the time to think about their future and real life issue. The teens should be made aware of the risk of social media, but there is a lack of public awareness (Evers et al. 2013 p.18). The number of internet user is increasing continuously, but the lack of education still prevails in the society.

Cody Miller, an amateur filmmaker in the year 2005, had recorded the video of him completion of the Halo 2 campaign and he had munch up music with the game session by playing one over the top of the another. This has given rise to a question that whether these arrangements make Halo 2 narrative. This question is very important for the fundamental issue of the nature of both video games and music, and whether the two are compatible. As the time goes on people, begin  to like video games with music and as a result to achieve the audio-visual effect the composer have to choose one among the two either force the music to be accustomed the action or the action to be accustomed the music (Abraham 2011). This is an example of increasing awareness of digital literacy among the people, which is making the ordinary people technologically more efficient.

The indigenous community of Australia is recognized as the original inhabitants and they form about 2.5% of the total population of the country. One-quarter of this population is located in the remote settlements of Northern Territory, Western Australia and Queensland. In all of these remote areas, people of the aboriginal population face huge problems regarding the socio-political challenges in the areas of education and health (Durey et al. 2016 p.1). Therefore, it is necessary to build digital literacy in these remote communities to reduce their level of disadvantage that includes improvement in school enrolments, attendance levels and student retention and achievement of better standards of numeracy and literacy. In these remote communities, the existing gap between the life of 21^st century and the educational practice of the children is found to be exceptionally wide. Application of newer technologies can help to offer innovative opportunities for developing learning resources and spaces for these demographically isolated communities (Rennie et al. 2016 pp.13-27). Digital literacy will not change their straightforward and simple lives but will enhance and support their present lifestyle. Non-use or limited use of mobile phones and the internet resulted in the fact that these community dwellers are not well aware of the spectrum of benefits that can be obtained from digital literacy. Therefore, the motivation to become digitally literate is also little. They are of the belief that they are happy practicing their old traditional cultures and it will be difficult for them to change their lifestyles accordingly. In addition, they are also not flair with the language associated with the digital technology and this lowered their confidence level.

Access to internet is an essential means for enabling the better delivery of community services, information, education and health as most of the government services in Australia are going online and making use of those services requires digital literacy. To support this initiative, the government has put up public libraries where the aboriginals who do not have internet access can use it free of cost. Skilled staff members are provided on hand for building confidence and help the groups and individuals to develop their skills of digital literacy in a socially-inclusive, friendly, non-threatening and trusted space (Martins et al. 2014 pp.1-13). This is important not only for the remote communities but also for the long-term economic development of Australia. The prime objective of public access to internet and digital literacy is to leverage the ability of all the citizens of the country to participate in the process of digital economy and making use of information in their lives. Building up of digital literacy in the remote communities is aimed at providing it in three levels of digital transformation, use and competency (Källander et al. 2013 p.e17). This will empower them to transform, use, share and discover the content present in the collections of the public libraries and the information available globally for creating newer content and stay connected with each other. The Northern Territory Library focuses on the preservation of the cultural heritage of the aboriginals helping them to learn and connecting them to information which allows the services to be delivered both virtually and physically.

References

Abraham, B. 2011, ‘Halo and Music’ in Cuddy, L. (ed) Halo and Philosophy, Open Court, Chicago and La Salle, pp.61-70. 

Apple, M.W., 2013. Teachers and texts: A political economy of class and gender relations in education. Routledge.

Durey, A., McAullay, D., Gibson, B. and Slack-Smith, L., 2016. Aboriginal Health Worker perceptions of oral health: a qualitative study in Perth, Western Australia. International journal for equity in health, 15(1), p.1.

Evers, C.W., Albury, K., Byron, P. and Crawford, K., 2013. Young people, social media, social network sites and sexual health communication in Australia:" This is funny, you should watch it". International Journal of Communication, 7, p.18.

Factor, J., 2014. Colleagues in the Antipodes: conversations with Iona and Peter Opie. International Journal of Play, 3(3), pp.224-234.

Hartley, J. 2009, ‘Repurposing Literacy’, in The Uses of Digital Literacy, pp.1-38.

Källander, K., Tibenderana, J.K., Akpogheneta, O.J., Strachan, D.L., Hill, Z., ten Asbroek, A.H., Conteh, L., Kirkwood, B.R. and Meek, S.R., 2013. Mobile health (mHealth) approaches and lessons for increased performance and retention of community health workers in low-and middle-income countries: a review. Journal of medical Internet research, 15(1), p.e17.

Lingo, E.L. and Tepper, S.J., 2013. Looking back, looking forward: Arts-based careers and creative work. Work and Occupations, 40(4), pp.337-363.

Martins, C., Oliveira, T. and Popovič, A., 2014. Understanding the Internet banking adoption: A unified theory of acceptance and use of technology and perceived risk application. International Journal of Information Management,34(1), pp.1-13.

Nielsen, W.S., Moll, R., Farrell, T., Mcdaid, N. and Hoban, G.F., 2013. Social media use among pre-service primary teachers.

Rennie, E., Hogan, E., Gregory, R. Crouch, R., Wright, A. & Thomas, J. 2016, ‘Introduction’, Internet on the Outstation: The Digital Divide and Remote Aboriginal Communities, pp.13-27. 

Self, R.J. and Aquilina, C., 2013. TechnoStress in the 21st Century; Does It Still Exist and How Does It Affect Knowledge Management and Other Information Systems Initiatives. In 7th International Conference on Knowledge Management in Organizations: Service and Cloud Computing (pp. 117-127). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.