Digital Literacy Skills: A Brief Introduction

This article is drawn from extracts from PETAA Book The Shape of Text to Come: How image and text work, written by Dr Jon Callow and published in 2013.

The issue of navigation and internet use is a critical one when students are searching and reading online. Viewing individual websites and pages will require both visual and verbal literacies, but the choices made in searching for information and using hyperlinks to move between sites are crucial as part of the meaning-making process. Don Leu and his research associates have identified five important comprehension skills that students require when reading online texts (Leu et al., 2011). They note that online reading comprehension almost always begins with a problem to solve and is usually limited to information texts. The five skills identified are:

• developing an important question
• locating information online
• critically evaluating information that readers locate
• synthesising across texts to determine a likely answer
• communicating discoveries to others.

Working in the classroom with a variety of electronic texts also provides many opportunities to explore the structures, purposes and affordances that interactivity and text creation provide. Maureen Walsh's work provides excellent examples of classroom research and practical ideas for applying work with electronic and multimodal texts (Walsh, 2006, 2010).