Digital Astuteness: Enabling the next Generation

Young people need to effectively navigate today’s complex online environment. Understanding the challenges of information-seeking and social networking will support us in mapping the skills young people need to school curricula. Digital Astuteness is a new term that encompasses and honours the complexity of the online environment for today’s learners.

Navigating the online world responsibly and skilfully are essential life skills now that the digital and real worlds interact so deeply. Young people increasingly face a range of challenges online. These include misinformation and challenging online engagements, such as cyberbullying.  Young people need to develop information-seeking and positive social networking skills to help them navigate the online environment and enrich their professional and social lives.  Unfortunately, educators in schools and universities are struggling to understand how to instil information-seeking and positive networking skills in students so that they can navigate this dynamic, online world. Our solution offers a better understanding of the range of information-seeking and positive social networking skills needed for young people to transition successfully into the workplace and wider community. 

‘Digital astuteness’ offers a framework to understand the skills young people need to navigate the online environment. Digital astuteness embraces and honours the complexity of the online environment for today’s learners. This framework includes digital skills and digital literacy; it also includes other variables crucial in today’s world.  These are digital personal branding, digital emotional intelligence and digital security and wellbeing.

Our research solution seeks to understand digital astuteness by engaging industry and community leaders in identifying the online skills that today’s young people need. We will engage expert teachers to help us understand teachers’ struggles and to identify the digital skills that are missing in the current curriculum. We will also engage with students to research what gaps in digital skills might exist from their perspective. This will support us to map the digital astuteness skills essential in developing curricula, at the primary, secondary and tertiary level. This mapping will support teachers to embed the digital astuteness into their practice and to develop their abilities to enhance their students’ skills across the curriculum.

The online environment is where young people engage with information and with each other. Yet the volume, variety and velocity of information, platforms and websites can be overwhelming. This often leads to misinformation or negative online engagements that impact both young people and broader society.  At the same time, traditional instructional strategies are struggling  to educate this generation in appropriate digital skills and attributes.  The disparity between the online environment and curriculum is in part due to the speed of technology advances and the lack of technology training of teachers and school leaders, and in turn, the students.  

Our team has worked with young people and teachers across numerous public and private schools. There is a unanimous cry from teachers for learning that helps teachers and students understand these skills as connected to their curriculum. Currently, educator talk is focused mainly on Digital Skills (programming) or Digital Literacy (often limited to finding and using resources). Digital Astuteness aims to be a comprehensive framework that includes online engagement, personal branding and security that students require to transition successfully into workplaces. Our initial propositions have been enthusiastically received by educator focus groups at 3 education conferences in Australia and internationally.

The Digital Astuteness Framework will benefit students and teachers by connecting their daily work of learning and teaching to the contemporary online environment. The framework unites the diverse concepts of digital literacy, personal branding, online engagement and digital skills. The project will make practical and theoretical contributions through mapping and sharing the Digital Astuteness concepts at international education conferences. We will contribute to the knowledge base by publishing in high-impact journals. We will consult with teachers in Australia (initially) and methods to embed these skills into teachers’ practice. This will develop in consultation with teachers, students and government education departments. 

Engage with 2 Expert Focus Groups (one from Industry and one from Community). Engage with 3 Focus Groups of Expert Teachers (one each from the primary, secondary and tertiary levels). There should be 8-10 participants per group for in depth discussion. - Verifying the concepts associated with Digital Astuteness with Industry and Community Leaders, and with teacher representatives. This is to seek the their thoughts on key skills and attributes that are essential for employees, and determine curricula gaps

Engage with two focus groups of students per level (primary, secondary and tertiary). There should be 8-10 participants per group for in depth discussion. - Determine if young people understand the concepts related to Digital Astuteness, identify the knowledge and capability gaps and ascertain whether students have encountered these in the current curriculum.

Being able to articulate clearly how the Digital Astuteness Fraemwork can be instilled within embedded curricula at the end of the project. - Work directly with teachers to map the concepts of Digital Astuteness to their curricula developments.

Our solution is training that develops the skills and attributes of young people to make informed, effective choices within new online technologies. We seek to support students in managing  information overload and diverse information by embedding digital astuteness in cross-curricular pedagogical practices. The novelty is we focus on the overall information ecology in online environments, thus providing young people with the skills to better navigate this complex space. This is an innovative solution as, currently, most governments and schools are unsure how to proceed within this digital space and appear to focus mainly on digital literacy and programming skills.

Our solution is not only human-centred but by its nature, involves human-computer interaction. It focuses on understanding  the online actions and needs of young people in the 21st century.  This initiative seeks to build a human-centred pedagogical approach through human-computer interactions to help young people – as the decision-makers of tomorrow – work effectively with the online technologies available in this technology-centric century. We will work with schools to empower teachers and leaders to develop resilient and digitally astute global citizens.  While this research is based in Australia, the initiative is globally applicable.

Initially, we will work with schools to map the curriculum development. We have access to five schools and two universities who are keen to seek support in this area in the initial stages. Once the initial research is verified, we will promote and share the results more widely through our extensive educational contacts in Australia and Malaysia.

Beyond the pilot proposed here, we can promote our work via a website and ongoing conversations with curriculum developers. This website will be supported by members of the research team who will moderate and promote questions and themes as they emerge.

Every member of our team holds ongoing positions in our respective institutions. This project can also be built into our established workload. We also plan to use our work to inform our own teaching and continuing engagement with our respective educational institutions and within our individual networks. The initial part of the project - in refining the Digital Astuteness concepts and mapping this to curriculum - is the challenging part of the project that we are currently seeking help in.

However, once we have verified and mapped out the concept to curriculum, we will need to eventually look at funding sources to scale this beyond Australia. One way of effectively promoting our work would be through a dedicated website that contain our information in the future, which can be easily accessible internationally.

The two main limiting factors are access to schools beyond Australia. This access will require resources to enable cross-cultural comparison of thoughts about the concept of Digital Astuteness and then, to map to local curriculum in each cultural context. While this initial project will attempt to include some schools in Malaysia, there is a need to eventually scale more widely.

The second limitation is that we will need to resource a staff researcher to help us drive the project. This researcher would be the main point of contact for the administration and data collection throughout the research.

https://theconversation.com/we-need-to-take-responsibility-for-our-own-safety-online-38368

http://laurenrosewarne.com/books/

https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/coding-in-the-classroom

We believe that our initiative has long term implications for the development of young people’s 21st century skills. While education departments around the world focus on renewing curricular to include digital skills, society also needs a generation of young people who holistically understand their interactions and engagements online. We want to work with education and community leaders to explore how to develop this understanding and to find mentors who are interested in the education of young people. We also seek mentoring in how to increase the scale of our solution widely for the benefit and well-being of the next generations.

A/Prof Shanton Chang (online behaviour and information seeking), Joanne Blannin (education), Dr Jason Lodge (educational psychology) and Dr Lauren Rosewarne (gender and cyberbullying) are all from Melbourne Uni. Dr Catherine Gomes (media, communication and migration) is from RMIT University. This interdisciplinary team suits the nature of this challenge.

Teams that are looking at 21st Century Digital Skills. However, we would love collaborations.