Friday, August 10, 2018

Digital Literacy Resource Platform (Berkman Klein Center)

There was a lot of publicity in the past week about Facebook launching a Digital Literacy Library that aimed to help people educate children about safe and responsible use of social media etc. However, it also received criticism for leaving out some topic areas and also for material literally being missing (see e.g. the article by Rachel Kaser). The main problem I have encountered is that it just says "Sorry, this content isn't available right now" when I try to access it (so I am leaving out the web address until it seems stable).

However, as I understand it (as far as I can, since I can't actually find the Facebook resources) Facebook have substantially reused resources from the larger resource offered as the Digital Literacy Resource Platform by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. These resources are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license, so are worth knowing about anyway.

On the home screen there are topics (e.g. "Digital access" "Data Literacy" "Artifical Intelligence" "Positive behaviour") and if you click through each has one or more units. Then each unit is a page with learning goals, links to resources, and suggested activities and assignments. There is a topic "Information Literacy" but it has a very large number of units (none of them explaining what information literacy is) so to be honest that section looks rather random. I think that each unit was tagged with all the subjects that apply, so (and I would not disagree with this, obviously!) a lot were tagged with IL.

However, I think overall the units are worth investigating as they are consistently and concisely presented, with some interesting subjects (e.g. using the digital space for advocacy) and useful links and teaching suggestions.
It says the Berkman site was produced by "a network of collaborators for curating and producing new tools. Our network includes MIT Scratch, New York Public Library, Press Pass TV, NuVu, the Engagement Game Lab, the Walnut Hill School, iKeepSafe, the National Writing Project, and WGBH" It's at https://dlrp.berkman.harvard.edu/
Photo by Sheila Webber: Dog in Greenwich Park, July 2018

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