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Anticipatory Digital Literacies Practices for an Uncertain Future
C. S. Walsh
College of Arts, Society and Education, Division of Tropical Environments and Societies
James Cook University,
Townsville, Queensland 4810, Australia
â E-mail: [email protected]
www.jcu.edu.au/college-of-arts-society-and-education
As machines, clothing, buildings, even body parts become âsmarterâ, humansâ digital literacy practices need to be anticipatory to avoid disruption. Anticipatory digital literacy practices are pre-active. They help humans understand what digital literacies practices they need to acquire and/or abandon to successfully adapt to new sociotechnical realities characterised by linear exponential technological change. In a probable future, some individuals and organisations will employ their anticipatory digital literacy practices to productively capitalise on technology innovations to maximise their business, economic impact and profits. But in a preferable future, all individuals have authentic opportunities to use anticipatory digital literacy practices at school to work successfully with others and artificial intelligence to address global challenges. Critical to addressing these global challenges is educationâs ability to help individuals understand the ethical dimension of their anticipatory digital literacy practices so they not only use them pre-actively, but with respect for others and the Earth. Equally paramount, is understanding that anticipatory digital literacies practices are not skills or competencies, rather they are cultural ways of doing things predicated on taking a pre-active stance to avoid disruption with different affinity groups.
Keywords: Anticipatory; Digital literacy practices; Anticipatory digital literacies; Preferable future; Pre-active
1.Introduction
The notion of what constitutes digital literacies proficiency in the present network economy is debated. Some view digital literacies practices as the set of skills and competencies needed to successfully engage with digital technologies. Others view them as the skills required to code software and the computational thinking skills of programing, designing, collecting and analyzing data and the systems-based literacies practices (Walsh, 2010) needed to communicate with simulations and games. Literacy educators argue digital literacies are the informative connections between literacy learning, semantic and existential meaning, and experiences of agency, praxis and pleasure.
This paper aims to aims to make a new contribution to the debate by arguing that digital literacies practices need to be anticipatory or pre-active in an uncertain future characterised by linear exponential technological change. Many educators understand that literacy practices are diverse sociocultural practicesâthat are always in fluxâwhere different individuals make meaning individually, collaboratively and communally. But, as machines and robots become âsmartâ, humans need to engage in digital literacies practices alone, with other humans and machines and their artificial intelligence (AI).
In a probable future, select individuals, corporations and governments will use individual, collaborative and communal anticipatory digital literacy practices to productively capitalise on technology innovations to maximise their business, economic impact and profits. These digital literacy practices are anticipatory because they are constantly shifting cultural ways of doing things predicated on taking a pre-active stance to avoid disruption with different affinity groups or stakeholders.
In a preferable future, educational institutions will offer a different kind of education to all students. This future is one that is not dysfunctional and actually prepares students not only for the jobs of the future, but with authentic learning experiences to use anticipatory digital literacies practices to address local and global challenges. Importantly this preferable future does not reflect an old industrial model, still largely prevalent today, where print literacy practices and digital literacy practices are still viewed as a finite set of discreet skills and competencies. Instead this education will provide learners with authentic opportunities to use anticipatory digital literacies practices to engage in strategic foresight exercises where they use digital technologies to create viable solutions and/or avoid disruption.
In this paper I first outline current conceptions of digital literacies and highlight why they are incomplete given unprecedented the linear exponential technological changes that are disputing all aspects of life. Then I introduce the term anticipatory digital literacies practices. I make an argument as to why I believe they are needed and how they are acquired. I also provide an example of anticipatory digital literacies practices. The paper concludes by stressing the need for individuals to understand the ethical dimension of their anticipatory digital literacy practices so they not only use them pre-actively, but with respect for others and the Earth.
2.Origins of Digital Literacy and Digital Literacies
Gilster first introduced the term digital literacy in 1997 to describe an individualâs abilities to comprehend and use information in multiple formats from multiple sources when it is presented via computers. Drawing on Paul Glisterâs (1997) original definition of the term, Jones and Flanagan (2006) argue digital literacy:
represents a personâs ability to perform tasks effectively in a digital environment, with the term âdigitalâ meaning information represented in numeric form and primarily for use by a computer. Literacy includes the ability to read and interpret media (text, sound, images, et. al.), to reproduce data and images through digital manipulation, and to evaluate and apply new knowledge gained from digital environmentsâŚthe most critical of these is the ability to make educated judgments about what we find on-line. (p. 5)
This definition of digital literacy tends to focus on general and transferable skills around interacting with information that does not recognize human intent (Lankshear and Knobel, 2015). Additionally, it is troubling that many primary and secondary educational institutions are currently struggling to provide a classroom environment that provides children and young people the opportunity to perform tasks in a digital environment, let alone make educated judgments about what they find online.
The term digital literacies, in the plural, was first introduced by Labbo, Reinking and McKenna in 1997 to describe workplace skills and abilities where individuals collaborate to access information, manage and manipulate data, purposefully navigate through multimedia and critically read and write digital texts. This definition also limits digital literacy to skills and abilities tied to information. Lankshear (1997) coined the term âtechnological literaciesâ, essentially digital literacies, to highlight the social practices in which a multiplicity of texts are designed, modified and shared digitally.
Lankshear and Knobel (2003, 2006, 2008) furthered the plural use of the term digital literacies to highlight the diversity of social and cultural practices and ways of knowing required to successfully use digital technologies. They provide a compelling rationale as to why digital literacies, in the plural, is important for education.
Rather, the educational grounds for acknowledging the nature and diversity of digital literacies, and for considering where and how they might enter into educational learning have partly to do with the extent to which we can build bridges between learnersâ existing interests in these practices and more formal scholarly purposes. (Lankshear and Knobel, 2008, p. 9)
In 2010, Gillan and Barton presented an enhanced definition of digital literacies, arguing they were,
the constantly changing practices of through which people make traceable meanings using digital technologies (p. 9)
This definition, like Lankshear and Knobelâs (2006) highlights that digital literacies are meaning making practices and sociological in nature. This stands in stark opposition to viewing digital literacies practices as skills or abilities. This is important because it moves understandings of digital literacies beyond technological determinism, thereby disrupting convention and traditional perspectives that still view digital literacies practices as a set of skills..
Recently, Lankshear and Knobel (2015) have highlighted how many present accounts of digital literacy are flawed. They critique and reject these mainstream approaches to conceptualizing and defining digital literacy for three reasons. âFirst...to define digital literacy purely or predominantly in terms of interacting with information distorts social practice and human intentâ (p.12). Second, they dispute a âtruthcentric stance toward information in the digisphere, and the way the ideals of âcredibilityâ and âvalidityâ are rendered in terms of conventional norms of epistemic authorityâ (p.12). Third, they argue âconceiving of digital literacy as some kind of âthingâ â an âItâ â is misguided, and open to the critique sociocultural theorists have advanced against the prevailing tendency to conceive conventional (alphabetic/print) literacy as an autonomous entityâ (p.12).
Understandings of digital literacies as practicesânot skills and abilitiesâis certainly not mainstream. Nor does it reflect how children and young people grow up using machines to play and learn on their own terms, often at their own pace and for their own purposes. It is critical for those in education, responsible for preparing young people for the future world of work, to shift their zeal from wanting to teach and assess skills and abilities, to creating authentic conditions for students to engage in the social practices that contribute to robustly building their digital literacies practices proficiencies. Lankshear and Knobel (2015) put it this way,
we should view digital literacies in a larger frame that resists over-attending to operational techniques and skills and, instead, emphasizes mobilizing and building on what learners acquire and know from their wider cultural participation and affinities. (p. 18)
It is troubling education is working now, more than ever, to maintain the status quo. There needs to be massive paradigm change, but that is not ânewâ news. It is obvious that education needs to transform teaching and learning spaces to more closely mirror the spaces individuals in the real world use to solve pressing problems. If schools had do it yourself (DYI) sandboxes and makerspaces, studentsâparticularly those who donât have computers at homeâwould have authentic opportunities to co-create, co-invent, and co-learn by using, acquiring and discarding their digital literacies to share, collaborate and experiment with each other, their teachers and machinesâ AI.
3.Becoming Pre-active
3.1.The rise of âsmartâ machines
How humans make meaning with âsmartâ machines, and increasingly robots, is always in flux because of linear exponential technological change. Technology is changing so quickly that it is impossible to predict how âsmartâ machines will further disrupt all aspects of life on Earth. Many changes are economic, particularly due to automation which will result in the loss of jobs in areas many students are already enrolled and studying in. But an equal number of these changes threaten security, sustainability and life on the planet. Consider this perspective from the The Millenium Project (2015):
To prevent the possibility of quantum computing with artificial intelligence and sensor networks growing beyond human control, we have to design human-friendly control systems and ways to merge wisely with future technology while living simultaneously in cyber-worlds and physical âreality.â Because advances in synthetic biology, ICT, and other future technologies make it plausible that single individuals acting alone could make and deploy weapons of mass destruction, global sensor networks will be needed to identify intent before action, advances in mental health will be needed to reduce the number of socio- and psychopaths, and new roles for the public will have to be found to reduce these threats. Future molecular manufacturing and 3D printing promise to give everyone a better living standard, but these also distribute the possibility of creating nano-armies, and they dramatically reduce world trade. (p. 3).
This possible and dark future scenario highlight the more pressing global challenges of the future that will require significant anticipatory or pre-active digital literacies practices to avoid such a future. It also highlights there are preferred futures over possible and probable ones.
3.2.Fostering anticipatory dispositions to work for preferred futures
Children and young people are not yet learning how to work for preferred futures at scale in schools. Students entering primary school today, will not enter the work force for nearly 10 years. They will need sophisticated digital literacies practices we canât predict. This has serious implications for teaching digital literacies. It signals that schools and educators need to create contexts that foster an anticipatory disposition in students to realise their digital literacies practices are not a finite set of skills or abilities. Rather, they are sociocultural practices that are in flux. And because they are in flux, this requires students to be pre-active. By being pre-active, they constantly scan the future (often called foresight or horizon planning) by analysing hard trends in the present to figure out what digital literacies practices their future will require. If the education on hand provides authentic contexts for students to be anticipatory, it provides teachers with tangible opportunities to build bridges between learnersâ existing interests in sociotechnical practices and more formal scholarly purposes (e.g to engage in risk-taking by designing solutions to problems as they work for preferred futures). Burrus (2015) who has an established worldwide reputation for accurately predicting the future elaborates on the need to be pre-active,
..in order to succeed you need to be pre-active to future known events rather than proactive, which means taking positive action now. How do you know if the positive actions you take now will pay off? You will have to wait and see. When you are pre-active to future know events using Hard Trends, you can be anticipatory rather than agile. This represents a fundamental shift from reaction to anticipation. It means instead of reacting to change that comes from the outside in, you need to be creating change from within yourself. ( 11) Such a view of anticipating the future be creating change from within yourself should provoke policy makers to rethink educational provision for children and young people globally. For educators genuinely concerned about the future and the children and y...
