Literacy Information

The Pew Research Center's report on Americans’ Internet Access: 2000-2015 uses the data they have collected anually on the internet habits of people in the USA. Headlines include:
"Older adults have lagged behind younger adults in their adoption, but now a clear majority (58%) of senior citizens uses the internet" with seniors showing higher adoption rates than young people (because there are still more of them not using teh internet).
"While Less-Educated Adults Are Catching Up, Their Internet Adoption Rates Are Still Below Those of College Graduates"
"Those In Higher-Income Households Are Most Likely To Use Internet"
"English-speaking Asian-Americans Are the Most Likely To Report Internet Usage"
http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/06/26/americans-internet-access-2000-2015/
Photo by Sheila Webber: bee, July 2015

Issue 45 (2015) of Comunicar focuses on Communicating in an Ageing World. It includes (in Spanish and English language)
- Use, Consumption and Knowledge of New Technologies by Elderly People in France, United Kingdom and Spain by Cristina González, Carlos Fanjul, Francisco Cabezuel
- Internet and the Elderly: Enhancing Active Ageing by Carmen Llorente, Mónica Viñarás, María Sánchez
- Active Ageing and Access to Technology: An Evolving Empirical Study by Raquel Casado Fernando Lezcano, María José Rodríguez
- From Digital Divide to Psycho-digital Divide: Elders and Online Social Networks by Begoña Peral, Jorge Arenas, Ángel Francisco Villarejo
- A Mobile Augmented Reality Assistive Technology for the Elderly by Rafael Saracchini, Carlos Catalina, Luca Bordoni
- Using Technology to Connect Generations: Some Considerations of Form and Function by Mariano Sánchez, Matthew Kaplan, Leah Bradley
and a number of others all at http://www.revistacomunicar.com/index.php?contenido=revista&numero=45
There are also some articles outside the main theme, notably:
Álvarez, J.F. and Cervera, M.G. (2015). Information Literacy Grade of Secondary School Teachers in Spain: Beliefs and Self-Perceptions. Comunicar, 23 (24), 187-194. http://dx.doi.org/10.3916/C45-2015-20 The abstract reads "Information Literacy is one of the dimensions of digital competence and, in today’s information and media-based society, it should be a skill that everyone develops, especially secondary school teachers due to their influence on this crucial stage of student development. In this investigation we aim to determine the current level of information literacy of secondary school teachers in Spain. For this purpose we have designed a questionnaire (n=2,656) which is divided into two parts: the first asks questions related to belief and self-perception of information literacy indicators, and the second presents practical cases in which the teachers have to demonstrate their skills in information literacy. The results confirm that secondary school teachers’ beliefs show rather high values but that, even if the level of information literacy that the teachers have is acceptable, there are certain aspects of the indicators related to assessment, management and transformation of information in which the teachers display serious shortcomings. This highlights the need to establish a training plan for information literacy for secondary school teachers in Spain."
Photo by Sheila Webber: pink dahlia, July 2015

Yesterday Pew Internet Research published a report on (US) Teens, Social Media & Technology. They administered an online survey, in English and Spanish, to a nationally (USA) representative sample of 1060 teens ages 13 to 17 and a parent or guardian, with the bulk of the data collected in autumn 2014. Some snippets:
"88% of American teens ages 13 to 17 have or have access to a mobile phone of some kind, and a majority of teens (73%) have smartphones."
"87% of American teens ages 13 to 17 have or have access to a desktop or laptop computer, and 58% of teens have or have access to a tablet computer."
"81% of teens 13 to 17 have or have access to a game console such as a Playstation, Xbox or Wii." "72% of teens play video games online or on their phone"
"92% of teens report going online daily — with 24% using the internet “almost constantly,”"
"The number of text messages sent or received by cell phone owning teens ages 13 to 17 (directly through phone or on apps on the phone) on a typical day is 30."
"When asked to rank social media sites by their frequency of use, Facebook is the platform that teens report that they use most often, with 41% of youth saying they use it most. Instagram is the next most often used social media platform, with 20% of teens saying they use it most often."
14% use tumblr, 24% use Vine, 33% use Google+, 11% use anonymous sharing apps, 47% use video connections such as Skype,
There are some differences according to gender, ethnicity and household income (e.g. more African-Americans have smartphones, wealthier homes have higher access to PCs, more boys than girls have access to a game console).
The report is free online at http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/04/09/teens-social-media-technology-2015/
Photo by Sheila Webber: cherry blossom, April 2015

Yesterday and today JISC (which has a remit to support use of technology in tertiary education) was holding its digifest. Skimming through the session titles, there was a good deal about research data, various aspects of Technology Enhanced Learning, sessions on specific applications and tools, sessions on issues around mobile tech, privacy etc. In some cases there is just a short abstract, but a lot of the powerpoints are there (on the "Programme" page), as well as a link to the tweets of whoever was tasked with livetweeting the session. The home page is here http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/jisc-digital-festival-2015-09-mar-2015 There are lots of tweets https://twitter.com/hashtag/digifest15?src=hash and various storifys (e.g. here of a session on Google tools and this one on the keynote about FutureLearn). Nicola Osborne did very informative blog posts: http://nicolaosborne.blogs.edina.ac.uk/2015/03/10/jisc-digifest-2015-day-two-liveblog/ and http://nicolaosborne.blogs.edina.ac.uk/2015/03/09/jisc-digifest-2015-day-one-liveblog/
Photo by Sheila Webber: use of old media, students campaign on campus for election to Student Union posts, March 2015

The latest ECAR results were published last year. This is an annual survey about academic experience of technology, carried out by the; US organisation, EDUCAUSE. In 2014 the data was collected from 17,451 academics, from 13 countries and in 151 institutions, and from 75,306 undergraduate students in 213 institutions: they were all asked about their technology experience. The survey included questions about use/value of MOOCs, learning analytics, Virtual Learning Environments and mobile technologies. One of the findings that they highlight at the start of the powerpoint summary of results is that technology acceptance is actually pretty much the same with students and academics, so I hope this will help dispel that "huge teacher/learner IT gulf" myth. The report in various forms is at http://www.educause.edu/library/resources/2014-student-and-faculty-technology-research-studies
Photo by Sheila Webber: seasonal wreaths on doors in South London, December 2014

The Pew Internet project released results of a "Web IQ test" adminstered to a representative (of the US population) sample of 1,066 internet users. It includes 17 questions, some relating to the origins of the internet and some slightly random (that's random in the non-statistical sense) questions about some people and things seen as important to the internet. They present the results overall, and also by age (younger people did better on the social media questions) and educational level (graduates did better generally) http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/11/25/web-iq/
As the above page gives the answers you might want to try the quiz yourself before looking at Pew's results: you can take the quiz here: http://www.pewinternet.org/quiz/web-iq-quiz/
Snowflake created from words on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web using Tagxedo

There's a preview of the New Media Consortium's The Horizon Project 2015 "a high-level summary of an upcoming edition’s findings ... to provide a snapshot of the topics that will be explored in the final edition." The full report will be published in the new year. The Horizon report use panels of "experts" to identify what they think are trends in technology affecting education. It started with one report and now has a lot of different ones focusing on educational level and region (see http://redarchive.nmc.org/publications) e.g. most recently a European Schools edition.
Personally, I have got increasingly frustrated with the way in which the reports ignore the huge raft of research into learning, teaching and indeed the use of technology in learning and teaching, to focus on recent reports and news. Although there are new things to learn all the time, there are also always things to learn from the accumulated evidence base. Anyway, here are their headline trends:
"I. Key Trends Accelerating Ed Tech Adoption in Higher Education
"Fast Trends: Driving Ed Tech adoption in Higher Ed for the next one to two years: Evolution of Online Learning; rethinking Learning Spaces
"Mid-Range Trends: Driving Ed Tech adoption in Higher Ed for the next three to five years: Increasing Focus on Open Educational Resources; Rise of Data-Driven Learning and Assessment
"Long-Range Trends: Driving Ed Tech adoption in Higher Ed for five or more years: Agile Approaches to Change; Growing Importance of Open Communities and University Consortia
"II. Significant Challenges Impeding Ed Tech Adoption in Higher Education
"Solvable Challenges: Those which we both understand and know how to solve: Adequately Defining and Supporting Digital Literacy; Blending Formal and Informal Learning
"Difficult Challenges: Those we understand but for which solutions are elusive: Complex Thinking and Communication; Integrating Personalized Learning
"Wicked Challenges: Those that are complex to even define, much less address: Competition from New Models of Education; Relative Lack of Rewards for Teaching
"III. Important Developments in Educational Technology for Higher Education
"Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less: Bring Your Own Device (BYOD); Flipped Classroom
"Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Two to Three Years: Makerspaces; Wearable Technology
"Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five Years: Adaptive Learning Technologies; The Internet of Things"
You can download a document with a paragraph on each of these from http://information-studies.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/successful-event-on-research-in-virtual.html From the short paragraphs that are there at the moment, I find some of section II rather confused, but it isn't fair to judge from a preview, so I will reserve critique until I see the whole thing ;-)
Photo by Sheila Webber: I ponder how  adequately defining and supporting digital literacy is a solvable challenge which we understand and know how to solve, in the virtual world Second Life. Anything seems more solvable with a couple of animated virtual bunnies in your hair.

A new Ofcom (the UK communications watchdog organisation) report was published in October, with a much statistical data about children's use of devices, the internet etc. Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes Report 2014. As usual, they are drawing on a relatively robust data set, including 1,660 interviews carried out with parents in May/June 2014. Just snatching some headlines from the executive summary "There has been a significant increase in access to, ownership of and use of tablet computers by children of all ages. In contrast, the incidence of TVs and games consoles in the bedroom is declining, while smartphone ownership remains steady. ... 12-15s are twice as likely to say they would miss their mobile phone than the TV, say they spend more time going online than watching television in a typical week, and say they prefer to socialise online rather than watch TV. In contrast, younger children still prefer TV to any other device, and spend more time in a typical week watching TV than doing any other media activity. ... Gender differences are evident from an early age. Differences include a preference for gaming among boys and for communicating online among girls. Parents also treat boys and girls differently, monitoring some aspects of girls’ online activity more closely than boys’" and particularly interesting for this blog "Older children are making judgements about the truthfulness of online content, including search engine results and how accurately people present themselves online." Extracting a paragraph from the section that goes into this in more detail "The number of 12-15s who believe that all of the information they see on websites used for school work or homework is true almost halved between 2013 and 2014: from 30% to 16%. Similarly, there was a two-fold increase in the number of children aged 12-15 who say that only some of the information is true (29% in 2014 vs. 12% in 2013). These findings indicate an increase in critical awareness for this age group." (p90)
http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/market-data-research/other/research-publications/childrens/children-parents-oct-14/
Photo by Sheila Webber: Autumn park, November 2014