0:00:00

Hello, welcome to EDU 1003 Digital Literacies. My name's Clare Southerton and I'm your
subject coordinator.

What we're going to cover in this lecture is just a little bit of a welcome to the course and a
bit of an introduction about what the course will cover, what the expectations of you during
the course are.

We'll go through the subject learning guide a little bit and the modules of the course and
we'll talk about the assessment in a little bit of detail, and kind of a bit of how the course
will run, what you can expect.

And then I'll talk a little bit of a sort of big picture stuff, like what my kind of idea of what the
course is going to be and what I'm hoping that you'll take away from it.

0:00:41
These kind of lectures will be uploaded weekly on Friday mornings, so that should give you
a little bit of time to have a look at them before your tutorials the following week. So let's
get started. A really great place for us to begin is by doing an acknowledgement of country.
So the School of Education at La Trobe respectfully acknowledges the traditional custodians
of the land our campuses and our education work are located on.

0:01:06
We recognize that First Nations Australians have ongoing knowledge and perspectives that
inform the past, present, and future of education, and we are committed to truth-telling
through curriculum alignment, pedagogical inclusion and ecological land justice. We are
committed to cross-curriculum priorities in Indigenous education, embracing opportunities
to enhance cultural capabilities of learners and educators and we promote the key drivers
of respect, relationships and reconciliation. And it might be a good opportunity for you to
have a look at where the Indigenous land that you are located on. So I'm at the Bundoora
campus located on Wurundjeri land and you might be able to locate the Indigenous land
that you're located on. So we're going to do some getting to know EDU 1003. The next
sections are going to include some expectations for you, so what can you expect of yourself
and what do we expect of you kind of completing EDU 1003. The subject learning guide, the
modules of the course, so you'll notice if you've looked at the LMS which you will have if
you're watching this video, that the course is divided into four modules. So we'll go into
those modules in a little bit more detail and then I'm going to talk a little bit about how the
course is going to run, so how do the tutorials and the lectures and the other different parts
of the course all fit together.

0:02:27
So let's get started. So what are our expectations of you? Well, a good way of thinking about
this subject might be kind of similar to how you think about committing to a job. So we
usually suggest you should allow around 10 hours a week for each subject. So if you're a
full-time student, you're looking at about a full-time load, sort of comparable to a full-time
job. And of course the kind of demands of student life really fluctuate. So you know towards
the beginning of semester it might not feel as busy and then of course you'll notice as the
semester progresses you'll probably find yourself a lot busier as all of the kind of
assignments and assessment start to be due. But I've kind of got a little bit of a rough
breakdown here. So you've got your online lecture, we say approximately an hour although
I like to keep them a little bit shorter so that you don't have to watch me talk at you for so
long.

0:03:20
But we do have two to four hours of online learning materials that includes your readings.
And that really can vary, so you'll notice that some weeks the readings I've set you will be
longer and more substantial, and other weeks, like this week, I've set two nice short
readings. I figured you might appreciate that on your first week. So giving yourself enough
time to work through that material is really important because it will really help you build
the knowledge that you need to complete your assessment successfully. You've got a two-
hour tutorial and if you can work through some of at least some of your online material
before you go to the tutorial I think you'll get more out of it although it's not essential and I
understand that some people do have their tutorials earlier in the week, say on a Monday,
and that can be more challenging.

0:04:05
So it's not essential, but it is preferable if you can have a little bit of a look. And then you
have to, we kind of break it down like two to three hours of say progressing your
assignment work. And of course, like I said, sometimes closer to those assessment deadlines
that that amount of work can build up. So just kind of now is a really good time to pace
yourself a little bit and think about how can you invest in your studies now when you have a
little bit more time so that down the line you're not scrambling to get everything done. But I
know it's easier said than done. So the next topic is the subject learning guide, which
hopefully you've had a chance to have a look at.

0:04:44
If not, check it out on the LMS. It's really, really helpful. And I've got a list of the things that
are kind of key, things that are contained in the subject learning guide. So of course, staff
contacts, so my contact details are in the LMS if you need to get in contact with me. Subject
intended learning outcomes, which I'll discuss in a moment in more detail, but that's
basically the kind of key things we want you to learn and come away from this subject with.

0:05:12
The graduate capabilities, so the things that, the kind of key aspects of a graduate teacher
that you're going to be learning in this course. A summary of the assessment tasks that
you're going to be undertaking in EDU 1003, and that's really important to have a look at
now rather than kind of discovering them closer to the deadline. Some really important
policies, procedures and guidelines outlined in the subject learning guide, so things like how
do you obtain an extension and things like that, make sure you have a look at those now
rather than at the very panicked moment when you're trying to obtain an extension. So it's a
fairly straightforward procedure, there's a form to seek an extension and of course all of
them come to me rather than going to your tutors. There's a clear kind of schedule of your
learning activities, so the kind of week by week breakdown of what you'll be doing, and
there's some details about how you'll be, about your assessment and how you'll be assessed.
So that detailed grading criteria is really important. It's probably something that we'll talk
about again down the line a little bit closer to when you're doing your assessment tasks, but
the detail grading criteria is really helpful when you are going to do your assessment tasks
to keep that in mind. How precisely am I being assessed? Exactly what am I being assessed
on so that I can make sure that I'm fulfilling that criteria when I do my assessment tasks. So
you don't want to kind of spend all your time on an assignment working on a particular
aspect of it that actually isn't being assessed.

0:06:51
You want to make sure you are hitting the criteria that you're being assessed for. And then
of course it has the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers, which are also
connected to the learning outcomes. So essentially the things we're wanting to teach you,
the learning outcomes of the course, are connected to the kind of professional standards for
teachers to ensure that there's that flow on effect from what you're learning here now to
what you'll be, the standards you'll be held to as an educator. So let's look a little bit deeper
into these learning outcomes. I won't spend too much time on this level of stuff, but the first
learning outcome is demonstrate knowledge of a range of digital skills and tools and how
these can be used in accessing, processing, and communicating information.

0:07:38
Appraise contemporary research and demonstrate a foundational understanding of the
relevant issues and the strategies available to support the safe and responsible and ethical
use of ICT, which is information and communication technology, in learning, and
collaboratively illustrate ethical concerns in digital spaces using multimodal and visual
literacies, and build a professional digital presence applicable to providing evidence of
learning. So you can kind of see, this gives you already a little bit of a picture of the kind of
things we're going to be concerned with in this course. So it's partly, if you think about the
first learning outcome, it's about understanding digital skills and tools, so understanding
digital tools and the skills to use them.

0:08:19
It's also very much connected to understanding research about digital technologies. So
being able to appraise and engage with the research, because part of being an educator is
being able to reach out to existing scholarship and appraise the kind of key findings and
integrate that into your teaching. So being able to understand contemporary research is
really important. The third learning outcome focused around ethical concerns in digital
spaces is a really big part of this course. So being able to understand the kind of complexity
of digital life and the way the different kind of ethical issues. We'll be spending a lot of time
talking about ethics, which I think will be really interesting. And then building a
professional digital presence.

0:09:03
So you'll notice that, and I'll talk about this a little bit later, the last assessment task is
building a portfolio, a digital portfolio, in the form of a website. So being able to use digital
tools to present yourself in a professional way. So these things kind of all working together
to address those learning outcomes. So let's have a look at the modules. So you'll notice the
first module, which you're in that module, you're there right now.

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Our module one, self and technology, is kind of quite an introductory module that sort of
gets you across some of the key issues. So the first week of the module, which you're doing
right now, Introduction to Digital Life, is very much kind of setting the scene and gives you a
bit of a sense of what are the key issues around digital technologies in education. And also
some of the content that you've worked through has also looked at things like academic
skills, identifying academic research, and things like copyright. So some of those kind of
broader digital issues. Next week we'll be looking at ethical, legal, and legal concerns in
digital spaces.

0:10:12
And then the following week we'll be looking at engaging digital tools for collaboration.
Then module two, we'll be looking at some really interesting things around kind of digital
play and the use of games in education, as well as this idea of the creator economy, which I'll
talk a little bit more about when we get to Module 2. And of course, at the moment, you'll
only be able to see Module 1, but the rest of the modules will become available very soon.
Then we'll talk a little bit more about equity and accessibility. So the ways that...and we got
a little bit of a taste of that in the weekly reading this week about the bring your own device
debate and the way that kind of bringing your own device to school can bring with it all of
these different equity issues around who has access to better devices and kind of the way
the social inequalities can be sort of exposed through that kind of program. But we'll talk a
lot more about equity and accessibility in week five. And then in week six, we'll be talking
about multimodal literacies, so the way that kind of different modes of engagement, visual,
audio, the way that those kinds of engagement have to be thought about in different ways.

0:11:29
Then in module three, sustainability, we'll be talking about some really interesting, again,
kind of like ethical, social, and political issues around digital technologies. And these might
be issues that you might not really immediately see the connection to digital literacy, but by
the time we get to week seven, eight and nine, you'll be right on top of it. Understanding the
kind of, the material impact of digital life, is what I've called it in the subject learning guides.
What is the environmental impact of technologies?

0:11:57
What are the kind of social, cultural impacts of technologies? So what can digital
technologies be used for in ways that are positive and negative and complicated? And we'll
also talk about STEM and STEAM pedagogies in week nine, which will be really interesting,
and I'll explain more about that when we get to it. And module four is going to be kind of
looking more at teaching and learning in digital spaces, so things that I'm doing right now,
using kind of online learning and what the techniques and strategies are for engaging in
those spaces. We'll also be looking at imagining future classrooms, so what are the future-
oriented trends that you can start to think about. And then in the last week, we'll be talking
about constructive feedback and embedding evidence.

0:12:46
So that is the course. Okay, the assessment. It's everybody's favorite topic to cover. So
you've got three assessment tasks. Your assessment task one, part A, which is worth 30%
and it's a multimodal digital presentation. But this is the research component. So it's a little
bit confusing, but part A and part B are both part of your multimodal digital presentation.
But your first part is the research component and the second part is the presentation. So the
first part is you conducting the research that then informs your presentation and you can
find much more detailed explanation of these assessment tasks in the subject learning
guide, but the research component is fairly straightforward. It's really just about
demonstrating your ability to find and analyze academic research and then the presentation
component is a five minute kind of educational video building on that research that you've
done.

0:13:47
The professional portfolio, you submit in the form of a website. And although that is due at
the end of the semester, there are a range of kind of smaller tasks that you can do
throughout the semester to kind of build up to that portfolio. So from week three onwards,
you'll notice some small creative tasks in the online learning content that you can complete.
So for example, like building an infographic and those tasks can be part, can be submitted as
part of your portfolio or they should be part of your professional portfolio.

0:14:22
So the aim of that is really just to allow you to build the portfolio as the semester progresses
rather than doing it all at the end. Of course, you can do it all at the end. I wouldn't
recommend it. I think you'll find that a little bit stressful. But of course, doing those little
activities as you go will mean that by the time you come to make the portfolio and submit
the portfolio, it should be a lot of the work you'll have already done throughout the
semester. But of course, we'll talk more about the assessment as it kind of comes closer to
the time that those tasks are due and I'll also have some online drop-in sessions where you
can talk with me about it and of course you'll be able to talk to your tutors. So how will the
course run? How will all of these kind of different pieces fit together? So you'll have the
weekly lecture which you're watching right now that'll be pre-recorded on the online
learning management system.

0:15:17
And the way I envisage this is kind of like bigger picture. I'll often be talking about the kind
of themes of the week, bringing them all together. And this is the opportunity for you to
kind of get a sense of sort of what is the kind of key takeaway of the week that I'm trying to
kind of give you in the other content. Then we have the weekly online learning content,
which is much more, of course, self-directed. It's those readings, it's the explanatory text
that goes along with it, there's some videos in there, there's sometimes some shorter
activities, and that's really digging in deeper and it's your opportunity to really delve in
deeply to things that really interest you, but also to dig more deeply into the themes of the
week and to specific issues and examples that I will give you in that weekly online learning
content.

0:16:07
And the weekly tutorials, which will be, of course, face-to-face, based on your campus with
your tutor, are really your chance to discuss the things that you've read and that you've
watched in the lecture, identify anything that confused you, especially because we're
reading academic readings sometimes for the first time or they might be more difficult than
other readings we've encountered. It's a perfect opportunity to say, hey, that didn't make
any sense to me or that was weird. And have someone, maybe like a fellow student, say
actually that bit made sense to me and this is why or have the tutor explain the issue more
simply or in different terms. And also to have a chance to discuss and debate because a lot of
the issues that we're going to be talking about are not straightforward issues. It's going to
be, you know, complicated things that don't necessarily have a simple answer. So it's a
really good chance to deepen your knowledge, build your knowledge, and to also discuss
and debate because it's also really important to get different perspectives on these issues
and kind of see outside of your own experience. And of course the assessment tasks are an
opportunity to build your skills and demonstrate your understanding so that you can be
assessed.

0:17:24
So now we've kind of gone through the housekeeping and the kind of like introduction to
the course. I wanted to kind of give you a bit of a sense of like what are some of the bigger
picture thinking that informs the course and like where am I going to, what kind of journey
am I going to take you on for the next 12 weeks? So I want to start with digital literacy,
because digital literacy is the name of the course, and we will talk about digital literacy in
much more detail later in the course, but I want to start by talking about how digital literacy
is often imagined as a skill set that's about being able to train our young people for the
hoverboards of the future, right? You know, this kind of like being focused on the
technology is often a really key part of how we imagine digital literacy.

0:18:18
And it really is like tied to this imagining of the future where we need digitally skilled
citizens because we are going to be in this much more digitally enhanced future where
there's like AI and like robots and you know this like very technologically advanced image
of the future like I keep getting promised like hovercrafts and like where are they right so
but I want to kind of push back a little bit on this definition because I think that it really
limits our thinking in terms of actually what does it mean to be digitally literate. And I want
us to think a little bit more about digital literacy as a capacity and as a kind of like flexible
capability rather than a specific skill for specific technologies. So I've got the ACARA
framework here which is ACARA stands for the Australian Curriculum Assessment and
Reporting Authority.

0:19:20
You're going to encounter a lot of acronyms. I don't expect you to remember them all
because I certainly can't. And I think the ACARA framework, they've got a digital literacy
framework here that I think is really helpful as a starting point. And it really, I think, shows
us that digital literacy is about much more than knowing how to use technology. And you
can see that of all of these different elements, managing and operating technology, which is
really about, you know, can you use the device, is only one part of all of these different
elements. So they've got managing and operating, practicing digital safety and well-being,
communicating and collaborating, investigating and creating.

0:20:02
And those, according to Akara, all make up what constitutes having digital literacy. Or you
could see them all as kind of different digital literacies, if you want to think about it that
way. But the way I really understand it is that digital literacy is about building the capability
to engage critically and creatively in digital life. And I'm going to explain a little bit more
about what I mean by that as we kind of go on in this lecture, but thinking a little bit beyond
kind of can I use the technology that I want to use to kind of that next step about engaging
with things in a critical and creative way. I also want to emphasize that digital literacy I
think is also about understanding the digital worlds that our learners live in.

0:20:53
So, it's not just, you know, digital literacy, it's not just important to be able to use these
technologies, but also it's important to have a critical understanding of these technologies
because they constitute a lot of the kind of lives that children and young people inhabit. So if
you think about how much time young people spend in digital spaces, on the internet, on
social media, it is really important to understand the impact and also the importance of
these spaces for young people. So it's really crucial that we understand that they also have
knowledge of these digital worlds and that we equip them with tools to critically engage, to
understand that these technologies aren't neutral.

0:21:38
Not to say that these technologies are inherently bad. It's not to say that digital technologies
are good or bad. And you'll hear me talk about this a lot. Technologies aren't neutral, but it
doesn't mean that digital technologies are bad or good. It just means they're complicated.
And it's important to equip learners with the tools to think critically about them and to
reflect on their experiences with that lens. So one thing I want you to be thinking about is,
you know, what are the kind of valuable knowledges that learners already have about
digital cultures from their lived experience?
0:22:14
It's really common, I think, to think of children, particularly younger children, as being, you
know, really vulnerable and needing to be protected. But it's also important to think about
and acknowledge the things that they do know and the understandings that they do have
from their experience. So how can we give space to their perspectives, I think is a really
important thing to kind of keep in mind as we're going through this course. So I really want
to encourage you kind of if you are feeling a little bit that mindset of like children need to be
protected from digital technologies. I encourage you to also let in the idea that they have
some interesting perspectives and interesting knowledge, and we also need to kind of let
them talk about their experiences and give some space to those experiences.

0:23:04
So kind of what are they like and not like about the digital technologies they're
encountering. So, not discounting the knowledge that learners themselves bring. But on that
theme of kind of technology not being neutral, I wanted to give you a bit of an example to
kind of get you thinking and we'll return, I'm sure we'll return to ChatGPT throughout the
course a little bit because I feel like it's all I ever hear about and talk about. So, if you haven't
heard of ChatGPT, it's a kind of language AI, that kind of language model AI, that essentially,
and you should have a play with it if you haven't had a chance to yet, that is essentially
getting a lot of hype and dramatic response at the moment for its ability to mimic human
speech. And kind of getting this reputation for being able to realistically, you know, produce
like writing essentially.

0:24:04
So there's a lot of kind of panic around the ability of ChatGPT to, you know, potentially write
student essays, to replace a lot of human labor because it can write realistic human text. But
it's also an interesting tool to play with as an educator to kind of see what it can do, what
are the kind of assumptions that it makes, what are the mistakes that it makes, and I
certainly don't think it's something we should necessarily as educators be afraid of, and we
can talk more about this when we get to the week where we talk about AI, but the reason
that I wanted to talk about chatGPT is that I think it presents us with an interesting
opportunity when we want to talk about the way that technology is not neutral, and I think
that digging into the non-neutrality, the kind of complexity, the way that technology is
political, is a really key part of digital literacy.

0:24:59
Being able to critically evaluate technologies is a core part of being digitally literate. So if we
look at ChatGPT, what I've got alongside the ChatGPT logo here is an article that came out
kind of a few weeks after all of the excitement around ChatGPT that was really unveiling a
bit of a sort of dark secret around the way that ChatGPT had been trained. So if you're not
that familiar with AI, the way that AI is trained is essentially they give it a very large
database of information that it learns from, but of course when you want to kind of teach it,
you have to have human beings interact with that information to kind of give it instruction.
0:25:49
So really important, like if given the data set was so enormous in this case for ChatGPT was
a large portion of documents and text available on the internet, there was a real effort on
the part of the company that made ChatGPT to make it clean and not produce sort of unsafe
content but the only way to do that was to have very low paid, well according to them the
only way to do it was to have very very low paid workers in Kenya essentially look at
extremely graphic and like unsafe content in order to filter that content out and to teach the
AI how to respond to ensure that that content was not seen by end users. So this is a really
interesting example of the way that a product like ChatGPT is presented as this really safe
thing, but the only way it was able to be made cheaply was to exploit and harm workers in
Kenya.

0:26:56
And there's a lot of really clear examples of this kind of exploitation in the tech industry
where low paid, usually people living in developing countries will be paid extremely low
wages, working in extremely difficult, exploitative conditions in order to prepare the digital
products that we then consume in affluent countries. So it's just an interesting kind of way
to sort of think about digital technologies when they often, we see a clean interface that
looks really nice, and we largely don't see, lots of really, really unsafe content, but it usually
is at the expense of someone else.

0:27:44
And in this case, very real human beings. So I know it's a little bit of a dark story, but I think
it's a really good example of the way that technology is not neutral. And as educators, it's an
opportunity for us to think critically about technology. So those are just a few little bigger
picture things to get you thinking. We'll dive more deeply into the material next week. But
some kind of key takeaways is I really just want you to be thinking about the way that
digital literacy is much more than just being able to use technologies. It's about getting our
learners, our students to be thinking critically about digital life and the digital spaces that
they're living in.

0:28:31
It's not about saying that technology is always bad because of course, like, I love the internet
and I've got a lot of really interesting examples of how digital technologies connect us and
create opportunities for people to, you know, like, build communities and do things that are
really positive. So I don't want you to think that this is going to be a course about how
technology is bad, but it's about building that critical capacity and understanding the ways
that technology isn't neutral. So hopefully that has kind of given you a bit of a sense of
where we're going to go on this EDU 1003 digital literacies journey. I'm going to try and
keep these lectures not too long so that you can get through all of the online learning
material that I've prepared. But if you have any questions or queries or anything that
doesn't make sense to you, feel free to ask your tutors in the tutorials or just flick me an
email and reach out. I'm always happy for you to book in for an appointment for us to have
a chat. I can do it over Zoom, but I am based on the Bundura campus, so if you want to meet
face-to-face, it's most likely going to be that I can only do it in the Bundura campus because I
can't physically be everywhere all at once unfortunately. I haven't yet learned how to clone
myself. So yeah if you do want to set up a meeting just of course contact me by email. But
I'm so excited for the rest of the course and to get to know you all as much as I can and good
luck with all of your digital literacy learning.

0:29:59
.