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What Is Digital Literacy? A Comparative Review of Publications Across Three Language Contexts
What Is Digital Literacy? A Comparative Review of Publications Across Three Language Contexts
Luci Pangrazio
Faculty of Arts & Education, Deakin University, Australia
Anna-Lena Godhe
Department of Culture, Languages and Media, Malm€
o University,
Sweden
Alejo González L
opez Ledesma
Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientıficas y Tecnicas, Buenos
Aires, Argentina; Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento,
Argentina
Abstract
Many scholars across the world have studied the knowledge, skills and dispositions needed to use
digital media. Yet as digital texts have proliferated and evolved, there has been much conjecture
over what it means to be ‘digitally literate’. As literacy researchers from Australia, Sweden and
Argentina we are concerned with the drive to standardise definitions of ‘digital literacy’ despite
notable differences in the cultural politics of education in each country. This paper analyses how
the term digital literacy has been conceptualised and applied by scholars in these three language
contexts. To do this, we analyse the most cited publications on digital literacy in the English-
speaking; Scandinavian; and Spanish-speaking contexts. In the analysis the variety of definitions
across and within each context, the key tensions and challenges that emerge and the implications
for digital literacy education are explored. Our findings reveal that similar tensions and challenges
exist in all three contexts, however, the path to resolution varies given contextual
differences. The article concludes with suggestions for educational research that acknowledges
and advocates the need for local conceptualisations of digital literacies in increasingly globalised
educational systems.
Corresponding author:
Luci Pangrazio, Faculty of Arts & Education, Deakin University, Australia.
Email: luci.pangrazio@deakin.edu.au
Pangrazio et al. 443
Keywords
Alfabetizaci
on, bildung, digital literacies, literacy research, socio-cultural literacies
Introduction
The digitalisation of everyday life has had significant implications for education. Given the
recent proliferation of digital devices and educational software, schools and educators are
still grappling with how to integrate technologies into the curriculum and prepare students
for their (digital) futures. Amidst these concerns, “digital literacy” has emerged as a key
concept to help educators, researchers and educational bureaucrats make sense of the com-
peting demands on schools and students in a digital society.
As it was first defined back in the late 1990s, digital literacy refers to “the ability to
understand and use information in multiple formats from a wide variety of sources when it
is presented via computers” and, particularly, through the medium of the internet (Gilster,
in Pool, 1997: 6). While this definition provided a useful starting point, digital texts and
practices have become more complex. For example, the rise of mobile media, particularly in
the developing world (see Pearce, 2013), is just one example of how diverse and divergent
digital practices are. As proved by studies on vernacular practices with technology (Dussel
et al., 2013), different contexts have different educational, technological and political his-
tories that influence the uptake and use of digital technologies, as well as how digital literacy
is conceptualised.
Despite these differences, there has been a drive to standardise the concept of “digital
literacy” to ensure its definition could be measured and compared in an increasingly glo-
balised educational setting. For example, multinational publishing and assessment company
Pearson Education have introduced a “digital literacy” certification to help students become
“more effective with technology”.1 In addition, UNESCO is developing “A Global
Framework to Measure Digital Literacy” (2018), which focuses on “relevant skills, includ-
ing technical and vocational skills, for employment, decent jobs and entrepreneurship”.
Definitions from multinational organisations such as these tend to standardise the concept
of digital literacy in an “instrumental” way, promoting skills that are labour-oriented.
As three literacy researchers working in Australia, Argentina and Sweden, we are con-
cerned by the overriding need to provide a standard definition of digital literacy. The goal of
this research is to investigate how approaches to digital literacy differ across these three
language contexts in order to find points of similarity and difference. In doing so, we pro-
vide counterpoint to the creeping universalisation of digital literacy as a standardised oper-
ational ideal. Across all contexts we have observed a deprioritising of the situated meanings
and approaches that have been a hallmark of social literacies. Our goal is two-fold. First by
exploring differences across contexts, we highlight why a standardised approach to digital
literacies education is problematic. Second, we explore the value of cross-national, multi-
disciplinary scholarship on social approaches to digital literacies in order to find the thread
of connection across communities.
In this article we draw on research in these three research contexts to tease out the
different definitions of digital literacy. From its early conceptualisation, digital literacy
1
See: https://certiport.pearsonvue.com/Certifications/IC3/Digital-Literacy-Certification/Overview.aspx
444 E-Learning and Digital Media 17(6)
has been defined in reference to different theoretical frames, which has meant that the
concept has been ambiguous from the outset (see Chase and Laufenberg, 2011 ; Tamborg
et al., 2018).After detailing the method, we analyse how digital literacy is conceptualised in
the English speaking; Spanish speaking and Scandinavian contexts and the implications this
has for digital literacy education in each country. We examine the dominant definitions, key
tensions and challenges and make a case against the creeping universalisation of this con-
cept. The article concludes with recommendations on how we might pursue a research
agenda that advocates for local understandings of “digital literacies”.
For example, whether digital literacy should be thought of as a list of skills or whether
it referred to something broader, such as social practices and values, remains an ongoing
question. The extent to which context should be emphasised is another point of difference.
Both of these issues have implications for digital literacy education and research.
For example, educators and researches working in the ‘skills’ tradition would focus on
what needs to be taught and understood, whereas those working in the social tradition
might be more interested in finding out what people actually do with digital media and
texts in their everyday lives. To researchers from the social practice perspective, digital
literacies cannot be separated from the social, technological and economic changes taking
place, so any kind of empirical work must take account of these broader shifts (Sefton-
Green et al., 2016).
Academic disciplines bind scholars to shared ways of knowing about what counts as
‘literacy’. In this article, we review work from scholars across a range of disciplines, includ-
ing education, information science and psychology (see Appendix A for a more detailed
summary of the disciplinary backgrounds of each author) - each with a different set of
priorities. For example, to computer scientists, digital skills and competency tend to be
more important than the identity work that takes place when participating. In this article,
we draw out these differences, exploring the plurality of literacies, as well as the plurality of
methods for identifying, measuring and developing them.
Methodology
Our aim in this article is to explore the diverse ways that digital literacy has been conceptu-
alized by scholars in three different contexts. While this is not strictly a systematic review, we
have used systematic methods to select the articles for review (see Gough et al., 2012; Grant
and Booth, 2009). Following Gough et al. (2012, p.5) this involved three key activities:
As our goal was to analyse the most well-known and used definitions of “digital literacy”,
we used Google Scholar to provide us with a list of the 10 most cited publications in the
English-speaking, Spanish-speaking, and Scandanavian contexts (i.e. 30 publications in total).
We chose Google Scholar because it is a leading search engine for scholarly literature
across the contexts we research. Searches were made in Google Scholar using the terms
“digital literacy/ies” and “digital competence” (a term used synonymously in Spanish and
Scandinavian contexts with digital literacy). The number of citations listed by Google
Scholar was used to determine the most cited articles in each international context.
The searches were made from October 2018 through to June 2019. A list of reviewed
publications can be found in Appendix A.
Since it is not possible on Google Scholar to choose to search for only peer-reviewed works,
these initial lists were screened to only include peer-reviewed publications. In addition, pub-
lications in which “digital literacy” was a minor focus were also discarded. We are aware of
the fact that using other databases may have given a slightly different result, however, our aim
is not to give a complete picture of what has been written about digital literacy, but rather to
enable the comparison of how the term is conceptualized in different contexts.2
446 E-Learning and Digital Media 17(6)
Each publication was closely read and re-read in terms of these five questions by a native-
speaking member of the research team. Individual analyses of each publication were syn-
thesised and written-up in English to form the basis of the review presented in the remainder
of this paper.
Findings
The findings within each context are presented in three subsections: Digital literacy as con-
cept; Digital literacy as educational initiative; and Issues and tensions. Each subsection is
organised and discussed under the most relevant subheading. For example, articles that
focus most intently on digital literacy in the classroom are discussed under the subheading
“Digital literacy as educational initiative” rather than “Digital literacy as concept”.
sociocultural perspective arguing for the significance of context and meaning making in
information science.
Adopting a situated literacies approach, Jones and Hafner (2012) (259 citations) link the
skills needed to use and critique digital technologies to particular contexts of use and appli-
cation. Like Gilster (1997) Jones and Hafner frame digital literacy as much broader than
simply functional use of digital devices, but as ‘the ability to creatively engage in particular
social practices, to assume appropriate social identities, and to form and maintain various
social relationships’ (p.12, emphasis in original). Despite this, the focus remains on digital
literacy for education and work, which is examined against the framework of the ‘new work
order’ ( Gee et al., 1996 ).
Adopting a similar approach, O’Brien and Scharber (2008) (187 citations) conceive of
digital and traditional literacies as more like different points on the continuum. They con-
ceive of digital literacy in the plural (i.e. digital literacies) and define it as ‘socially situated
practices’ which are ‘supported by skills, strategies and stances that enable the representa-
tion and understanding of ideas using a range of modalities enabled by digital tools’ (p. 67).
O’Brien and Scharber argue that digital literacies should be seen as ‘evolving’, as digital
practices ‘shape, and are shaped by, youth inside and outside of school’ (p. 66). Rather than
seeing traditional print based and digital literacies as opposite ends of the spectrum they
argue that education should work to ‘braid together new digital literacies and old or already
established literacies’ (p. 67).
The main point in Lankshear and Knobel’s (2008) (202 citations) introductory chapter on
digital literacy is to argue the importance of seeing digital literacy in the plural (i.e. digital
literacies). They provide three reasons for this: the sheer diversity of digital practices that
exist; the strength and usefulness of adopting a sociocultural perspective on literacy prac-
tices; and the benefit of an expansive view when considering digital learning. They argue
digital literacies should be seen as a sociocultural practice and that there are different ways
of reading and writing with digital texts.
(p. 13). Furthermore, acknowledging the different ways of being digitally literate can
address longstanding structural inequities.
At the conclusion of his article, Bawden (2008) (438 citations), puts forward four com-
ponents for digital literacy education based on his reading of Gilster (1997). They are:
Underpinnings (i.e. traditional literacy and computer/ICT literacy); Background knowledge
(i.e. nature of information resources); Central competences (i.e. ‘knowledge assembly’);
Attitudes and perspectives (i.e. independent learning, moral/social literacy).
In a slightly later article, Alkalai and Aviram (2006) (176 citations) adopt a similar
premise to (Martin, 2005) and Alkalai (2004), arguing that the discourse on digital literacy
‘lacks a sound integrative framework and theoretical foundation’ and calls for a ‘clear and
theoretically-grounded view of the basic literacies required for effective learning in digital
environments’ (p. 1). Adopting Alkalai’s (2004) earlier idea, they argue that digital literacy is
a ‘survival skill’. However, in this article their main goal is to test whether digital literacy
should be thought of as a coherent list of already existent skills or whether it goes beyond
this to mean ‘something much deeper’ (p. 3) involving completely different epistemologies
and values to more traditional print-based literacies. Alkalai and Aviram’s question stems
from a binary perspective in which digital texts are seen as antithetical to traditional print
based texts. As such, they argue that unlike traditional print-based culture, digital culture is
‘post modern, multimedia-based, branching and much less individual-oriented’ (p. 16). This,
they argue, lays the foundation for a decidedly new type of literacy – digital literacy.
meanings of literacy and alfabetizaci on (the term which stands for literacy in Spanish) was
first noticed in the 1980s, when education reforms and standardized evaluations carried out
by different English-speaking countries were translated to other languages, along with their
terminology. While alfabetizaci on originally refers to the procedure of encoding and decod-
ing written language and focuses on ‘mechanical skills’, more recent and broader conceptu-
alizations of this term relate to the use of written language in context, which is closer to the
English term ‘literacy’.
Also from a critical perspective, Gutierrez Martın and Tyner (2012) (280 citations) take
up Buckingham’s work (2011) to propose a media education in which digital competence is
neither reduced to its technological and instrumental dimension nor the perils of use.
Instead, these authors point out the need to pick up the key aspects of critical approaches
from old media education (Masterman, 1985) as a means to rethink new media.
All the most cited works from the Spanish speaking context are concerned with the increas-
ingly complex nature of communication and cultural practices. Some of them point out the
need to transcend traditional literacy and to address the new emerging traits of digital culture
in the educational field in terms of multiliteracy (Area Moreira et al., 2008) (235 citations).
Hatlevik and Christophersen (2013) (113 citations) write that digital literacy and digital
competence are often used as synonyms since they do, to some extent, overlap. When
referring to the differences, however, they compare each with digital skills, which focus
on technological issues, and regard both digital literacy and competence as broader terms
that incorporate skills, understandings and critical reflections. According to (Krumsvik,
2008) (143 citations), digital competence is the most commonly used concept in
Scandinavia. Based on an overview of how digital competence is defined in European and
global policy documents, Søby (2013), concludes that the concept has a double function as
agenda setter since it is a principal concept in innovation policy and educational reform,
while simultaneously acting as an objective in the development of schools and pedagogy.
Krumsvik (2008) argues that competence as a concept is more holistically interpreted in
Scandinavian English emphasising not only the use of digital texts and technology, but also
how to be a digital citizen.
skills, didactic ICT competence and learning strategies. Krumsvik considers digital bildung
to be a meta-perspective that needs to be acquired by teachers in order to understand how
bildung influences the three other components.
Discussion
This article has examined how the term digital literacies is defined and applied in teaching
and research across the English speaking, Spanish speaking and Scandinavian context.
While using citation counts of articles does have limitations, it provides a broad indication
of the articles that have gained prominence in each of these contexts. We use this as a way of
exploring issues that have concerned us as literacy researchers, such as the way literacy
research articulates (or not) with young people’s digital lives, as well as the changing
focus of curriculum, pedagogy and educational policy. As sociocultural researchers we
are particularly attuned to the influence of context on digital literacies. Yet despite local
differences, we find some universality to the tensions that emerge in all three contexts –
tensions associated with the conceptual, practical and political dimensions of digital liter-
acies research.
The first, and perhaps most obvious thing to note, is that the term digital literacy is most
commonly used in English speaking parts of the world. Originating in the US (Gilster, 1997)
and spreading quickly to the UK, Canada and Australia, the term digital literacy appeared
to capture the set of skills and dispositions required for effective use of digital media. It
refers not only to the skills and capacities required to use digital texts, but also a disposition
454 E-Learning and Digital Media 17(6)
toward the digital that is both critical and creative. In these early conceptualisations, digital
literacy had a normative function, with little focus on the everyday literacies individuals
bring to their use of digital media.
While digital literacy is now used in the Spanish speaking and Scandinavian research
contexts, it is not easily translated, and terms such as digital competence, digital bildung and
alfabetizaci on digital have greater prominence. Perhaps the closest to Gilster’s (1997) orig-
inal definition of digital literacy is the Spanish alfabetizaci on digital and the Scandinavian
digital bildung. Both terms, like digital literacy, are broader in definition and emphasize that
‘literate’ technology use involves digital skills, as well as critical, conscious and reflective
capabilities (Gutierrez Martin, 2003; Voogt et al., 2013). However, alfabetizaci on, bildung
and competence capture something specific to the contexts in which they are used, and it is
this specificity that will be lost as the term ‘digital literacy’ becomes the standard. Indeed, as
some have argued the globalisation of the term ‘digital literacy’ could be seen as a kind of
‘cultural colonialism’ (Kress, 2005).
Across all three contexts digital literacy refers to something broader than digital compe-
tence, digital skills or digital proficiency (Area Moreira, 2008; Bawden, 2002). Digital com-
petence, for example, refers to the specific set of skills required to be digitally literate,
whereas digital literacy refers to skills as well as dispositions, including the tacit and
social practices associated with digital media use. In more recent years, with the push to
standardise digital literacy as a set of ‘skills’ the trend has been against social approaches to
literacy. However, several scholars (Buckingham, 2011; S€alj€ o, 2012) have critiqued broader
definitions of digital literacy as ‘vague’, arguing that digital literacy becomes a ‘catch-all’
phrase for knowledge, competence and learning. This might explain why the term ‘digital
competence’ rather than ‘digital literacy’ has become an agenda setter for education policy
in Scandinavia (Søby, 2013).
Focusing more specifically on ‘digital literacy’, the different definitions analysed in this
article reveal the tensions evident in the field. These definitional debates have been more
prominent in English speaking research, whereas in the Scandinavian and Spanish speaking
context the literature has been more focused on applied understandings of the term. Yet
despite the prominence of the term in the English-speaking context, and after reviewing the
articles listed, it is still difficult to define what is meant by ‘digital literacy’. This has been an
ongoing challenge for digital literacies research (see Chase and Laufenberg, 2011; Sefton-
Green, Nixon and Erstad, 2009), and shows no signs of being resolved any time soon. Some
believe this lack of definition is positive (i.e. Lankshear and Knobel, 2008; O’Brien and
Scharber, 2008), as not one form of digital literacy will be appropriate for all learners or
even the same learner across their life course. However, the definitional ‘squishiness’ (Chase
and Laufenberg, 2011) of digital literacy has implications for education, which is only
exacerbated by the fact that students and teachers relate to technology in different ways
inside and outside the school. Sefton-Green, Nixon and Erstad (2009) argue digital literacy
needs to be framed ‘far more at the intersection of formal and informal learning domains
where “top down” and “bottom up” approaches meet’ (p.110).
Some of these tensions existed well before literacies became ‘digital’. Perhaps the most
significant of these is whether literacies are a cognitive process or a social practice, which has
implications for how digital literacy is taught in schools. If literacy is seen as a social practice
then the pedagogical approach might involve educators connecting school based digital
literacy tasks with student’s everyday practices and their existent ‘funds of knowledge’
(Moll et al., 1992). On the other hand, if it is approached as a cognitive process then
Pangrazio et al. 455
pedagogy might focus on building new skills that can be applied to digital technologies in a
functional way. These are unresolved tensions which are glossed over in the drive to stan-
dardise the term. As a consequence, at the international level ‘digital literacy’ is approached
in a more generic and instrumental way and avoids drawing on the specific operational
context of the learner.
Indeed, in contrast to the plurality and expansion of digital cultures, and by extension,
the skills required to be digitally literate, according to the works reviewed there has been
little expansion to digital literacies education in all three contexts. In the main, social
approaches to digital literacy remain on the sideline, meaning young people’s digital lives
remain quite separate from school-based programs (Livingstone and Sefton-Green, 2016).
This is not to say that there are no innovative digital literacies programs taking place in
classrooms around the world – as we know for a fact there are – but just that these are not
often in the most cited academic literature. Adopting a sociocultural approach to digital
literacies means researchers and educators should not only appropriate and extend upon
everyday uses of digital media, but also investigate how these cultural practices can be
engaged with in the formal school curriculum. In doing so it is also necessary to understand
how formal curriculum is also cultural and how it is appropriated by teachers. In the rush to
standardise digital literacy, we are concerned that social and local approaches to digital
literacies will continue to be overlooked even though it is evident across all three contexts
that this is the most productive method of engaging students.
Related to this point, is the question raised in each of the three contexts examined
regarding the overarching purpose of digital literacy education. Is the goal of digital literacy
education to create productive workers in the ‘knowledge economy’ or is it to help individ-
ual’s realise personal and social liberation? Indeed, across all three contexts, scholars rec-
ognise the need to see literacies in the plural (ie. ‘literacies’), as diverse texts and codes
require diverse literacies. Yet it is this fine-grained, learner focused approach that will be
further lost if multinational educational-technology companies are left to determine what it
means to be digitally literate. While best pedagogical practice might suggest scaffolding
students’ understanding of the technological, as well as the social and personal implications
associated with digital practices, this approach does present a challenge to international,
standardised testing.
In recent decades, critical pedagogical theories, particularly in literacy, have played a
central role in overcoming restricted perspectives on the social and political purposes of
education. We have learnt from Paulo Freire (1977) that literacy can be conceptualized as
a series of situated social and political decisions that allow subjects to interact with the
existing culture as well as to recreate it in a critical and emancipatory way. Other con-
tributions to critical pedagogy from Dewey (1995) have made it possible to develop a
humanitarian approach to democratic education and rethink the values that guide learning
in relation to the social practices of digital culture. These ideas have been crucial to
critically transcend literacy in terms of the acquisition of neutral, ahistorical, cognitive
abilities which satisfy the educational requirements of an increasingly predatory and con-
centrated global market.
We also understand that the process of standardisation of digital literacy indicated in the
beginning of this work is part of a broader tendency that seeks to blur the disputes that
underly the notion of digital literacy in favour of a functional, technical perspective of this
notion. Given this, our comparative work has been an attempt to bring those disputes to the
surface and systematize them as part of the present educational scenario.
456 E-Learning and Digital Media 17(6)
Final remarks
To conclude, we make two suggestions for future digital literacies research. First, future
research should investigate the tensions that arise when critical pedagogical approaches are
reconfigured into digital literacy frameworks and operationalised in schools. In particular, a
question that arose in all three contexts was whether the goal of digital literacies is to create
productive workers in the ’knowledge economy’ or, in a more sophisticated fashion, address
active engagement with democratic citizenship. This issue goes to the very heart of digital
literacy education and research and in many respects is resolved by the individual teacher
and/or researcher as they decide which theories best align with their values and their student’s
needs. A variety of approaches and models to digital literacy is therefore an advantage, and
tacitly acknowledges the right of the educator to choose. Investigating how educators make
these decisions, as well as the discourses that influence the decision-making process would
help understand how these theories and frameworks are operationalised in classrooms.
A final suggestion for future research might be to investigate how digital literacies ped-
agogies are addressed in educational institutions. Many lines of research assume that educa-
tional institutions –and education itself– must be transformed; either to adjust their culture
and traditions to fulfil democratic citizenship or meet the imperatives of the global market.
Yet this approach often overlooks the social and cultural dimensions already present in
current curriculum and pedagogy, and in the broader institutions of schooling. All of these
points are key to transformation processes in the educational field. Detailed ethnographic
accounts of how digital cultures and practices manifest in schools would guide researchers as
they reconceptualise digital literacies models to meet the needs of educators and students.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
ORCID iD
Luci Pangrazio https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7346-1313
Supplemental Material
Supplemental material for this article is available online.
Notes
1. See: https://certiport.pearsonvue.com/Certifications/IC3/Digital-Literacy-Certification/Overview.
aspx
2. It is important to note that the most cited Spanish speaking publications in Google Scholar are
written by Spanish scholars. Despite being absent in this investigation, we acknowledge that Latin
American scholars have had a major impact on the field of digital literacy. The scope of their work
on this subject remains to be studied.
Pangrazio et al. 457
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Author Biographies
Luci Pangrazio is an Alfred Deakin postdoctoral research fellow at Deakin University
(Australia) focusing on critical literacies and the changing nature of digital texts. Her
research studies personal data and privacy, the politics of digital platforms, the gig economy
and young people’s critical understandings of digital media.
Anna-Lena Godhe holds a PhD in Applied Information Technology and is currently work-
ing as an associate professor in Educational Science at Malm€ o University. Her research
interests revolves around the use of digital technologies within language education.