Digital Literacy and Subject Matter Learning

It is generally agreed that learners need to acquire digital literacy in order to act as competent citizens, employees and entrepreneurs in a digitalised environment. It is also generally agreed that digital literacy is the responsibility of educational systems that are themselves increasingly digitalised. Studies show that while students' digital production is a powerful driver for learning, a lack of digital literacy among teachers and students is an equally powerful barrier. There is no shared conception, however, of the meaning of digital literacy that may mean both bildung (general education) and a wide range of specific skills and competences: from basic computer skills, to source criticism and multimodal analysis, to social norms in online environments. Therefore, learning designs that are aimed at learners' acquisition of digital literacy, including related learning objectives, appear to be what Feltovich and colleagues call ill-structured (1996). In this paper, we present approaches that are embedded into everyday school practise and combine the acquisition of digital literacy as both bildung and a set of specific competencies. Accordingly, digital literacy need not necessarily be a course on the curriculum. These approaches rest on findings stemming from a large ongoing project within Danish primary and lower secondary schools, in which students worked with digital production of subjects and cross-disciplinary learning objects that were aimed at other students. These learning designs appeared to produce arenas in which students challenged and developed their digital literacy. The empirical data were produced through a mixed-methods approach whereby action research-one of the mixed methods-was combined with a series of interventions that supported iterative improvements to (and changes in) the learning designs and practise throughout the project's life cycle. The findings thus far are that digital production facilitates students' learning processes and qualifies their learning results in both digital and subject matter literacy when executed within a teacher-designed framework that empowers student agency. At present, the project's findings and practises are being implemented in the participating schools and at teacher educations. Because the findings are published elsewhere (together with a presentation of our learning design theory and research methodology), this paper emphasises the theoretical side of the suggested approaches based on Allan Martin's conceptual model of digital literacy, which we expand with Manuel Castells' self-programmable individual and Margaret Boden's concept of creativity. To conclude, we point to areas of interest for future development and research in the field.