A talk delivered at Dublin City University on Friday 12th May 2017

1. Researching Digital
Literacy
from the ground up
Photo by ibrar bhatt https://www.flickr.com/photos/87248369@N03/20406599061/
@ibrar_bhatt
ibrarspace.net
i.bhatt@qub.ac.uk
NIDL Visiting Scholar Series
Fri 12 May 2017
Dublin City University
Dr Ibrar Bhatt
Lecturer in Education

2. This talk
•Understand how literacy occurs in and through the practices of
people, their networks, and their contexts (i.e. social practices)
•Explore ways to examine digital literacy in context to enhance
teaching and learning in HE
•Present an agenda for how to examine digital literacies

3. Controversies

4. This debate is not new.
Plato records Socrates’ objection to the practice and
technology of writing (‘Literacy’), stating that it would
erode memory and cognitive functions, make people
rely on data/information and not knowledge, and
ultimately have a negative effect on society (Phaedrus)
Educators therefore need to better understand new
controversies, and the impacts of technologies on
new literacies

5. Literacy as social practice
Literacies are:
• Experienced within specific contexts
• Attached to professions, communities, and places
• Part of particular cultural histories
• Mediated by material objects and technologies
Therefore, to understand them, you need a thorough exploration of contexts

6. Literacy as social practice
What counts as Literacy in a ‘social practice’ approach depends on:
• The institutions in which it is embedded
• The processes through which it is acquired
• The practices through which it it is enacted
Therefore, to engage with Literacy becomes a form of critical social inquiry

7. Barton and Hamilton (2000) help conceptualise literacy in the following terms:
• Literacy is best understood as a set of social practices; these can be inferred from events which are
mediated by written texts
• There are different literacies associated with different domains of life
• Literacy practices are patterned by social institutions and power relationships, and some literacies
are more dominant visible and influential than others.
• Literacy practices are purposeful and embedded in broader social goals and cultural practices
• Literacy is historically situated
• Literacy practices change and new ones are frequently acquired though processes of informal
learning and sense making
(Barton & Hamilton 2000: p. 8)

8. Literacy practices like graffiti have a constellation of social practices
surrounding them: music, protest, territory, politics, etc.
Photo by ibrar bhatt https://www.flickr.com/photos/87248369@N03/32967559021/in/dateposted-public/

9. Controversies

10. In each of these headlines there is a crisis narrative surrounding Literacy, its relationship to Technology,
and what that means for our Society
• We need to find out certain things (collect data) in order to understand these practices better (research)
• Often there is a pre-supposed ‘proper’ way of doing Literacy. Who benefits from this view of Literacy?
(critical questioning)
• There are issues (challenges and opportunities) in teaching contexts (pedagogy)
Research – Critique – Pedagogy

11. Researching digital literacy ‘from the ground up’
What kinds of research questions and methods of data collection can we use?
https://c1.staticflickr.com/4/3841/14391226325_8c35c2a652_b.jpg

12. Getting to know a context
Exploring people’s subjective experience with digital literacy is vital to our understanding of how to
develop pedagogies. In digital environments, we can examine:
• Habits of use with digital media
• Networks of people and places
• Applications, devices and platforms
• Digital literacy policies and frameworks
• Historical trends with digital media
• How people obtain & discern information, and make sense of the world

13. Examining cases of digital literacy
• Ethnographic methods (e.g. Barton & Hamilton)
• Focused interviews
• Participatory methods (e.g. Venn diagrams, see Bhatt 2017a)
• Multidimensional screen recordings (see Bhatt et al. 2015; Bhatt 2017b)
• Self-tracking applications

14. Image from Bhatt (2017b)

15. Researching (new) digital literacies
Current methodological trends in the Social Sciences, Educational Research, and Linguistics

16. A ‘technobiography’ as an interview method
Originating in Kennedy (2003) and elaborated on in Page et al. (2014).
This method can focus on:
• personal practices with digital media (lived experience)
• Online representations of the self
• phases of change over time
• different domains of life
• how habits of use emerge in life
• personal use vs prescribed use.

17. Activity
i) Carry out a technobiographic interview with the person next to you.
Typical questions can include:
1) When did you first use a mouse? Send a text message? Search for something on the Web? Set up
a social media profile?
2) What caused this first usage? Was it mere inquisitiveness? Or did you have to?
3) Can you remember the first [essay, email, etc.] that you wrote? How did you write it? Is it
different to how you would do it now? What has changed over time?
4) What irritates you most about digital technology?
5) What do you enjoy most about digital technology?
6) Tell me about the first time you used a digital translation app/device. How has your use of these
evolved over time?
7) When did you first interact with someone multingually online? How have these practices evolved
in your life?

18. Final points
Researching digital literacy using a ‘social practice’ approach helps us to look at the
funds of knowledge that learners bring to education. And to use those funds to
inform pedagogies and a better understanding of learners.
What it means to be digitally literate is always in flux.
Focusing a lens on student practices as the locus of inquiry allows us to see how
both knowledge (and ignorance) are related to a person’s digital literacy practices.

19. References:
BARTON, D. & HAMILTON, M. (2000) Literacy Practices. In: BARTON, D., HAMILTON, M. & IVANIC, R. (eds.) Situated
literacies: reading and writing in context. London: Routledge. 7-15
BHATT, I. (2017a). Assignments as controversies: digital literacy and writing in classroom practice, Routledge Research in
Literacy
BHATT, I. (2017b) ‘Classroom digital literacies as interactional accomplishments’, In Researching New Literacies: Design,
Theory, and Data in Sociocultural Investigation, Knobel, M. and Lankshear, C. (eds.), New York: Peter Lang. pp. 127-149
BHATT, I, DE ROOCK, R & ADAMS, J. (2015). Diving deep into digital literacy: emerging methods for research, Language
and Education, Vol. 29 (6), 477-492
KENNEDY, H. M. T. (2003) "Technobiography: Researching Lives, Online and Off." Biography, vol. 26 no. 1, 2003, pp. 120-
139. Project MUSE
PAGE, R., BARTON, D., UNGER J. W. and ZAPPAVIGNA, M. (2014) Researching Language and Social Media: A Student
Guide. Abington and New York: Routledge

20. Dr Ibrar Bhatt
Lecturer in Education
@ibrar_bhatt
i.bhatt@qub.ac.uk
ibrarspace.net