The project was initiated as response to the increasing need to address issues relating to the digital within the Institute for Further Education and Counselling.
In the context of laboratory situations, participants shared experiences regarding phenomena of the digital in the fields of education and further education and discussed challenges and premises for creating new knowledge scapes. They were particularly interested to consider societal and ethical dimensions of the digital and its generative powers to shape and transform our realities (Kultur der Digitalität, Stalder 2016). Agility was one of the leading principles for the laboratory which consisted in the following: to develop small parts, to get feedback rapidly, to test, to change and to develop further. In this logic, the participants committed to describing paths rather than destinations.
The video work (co-produced Samuel Dématraz) addressed topics of cultures of the digital connected to political challenges realized in an artistic format.
As an introduction to a workshop with participants from the university, three avatar figures were developed that set the stage for ensuing conversations regarding the topic of “digital literacy”.
The term “digital literacy”, introduced in the 1990s, can be summarised as “mastering ideas not keystrokes” (Gilster 1997). The search movements called for by digitalisation go beyond aspects of complex technological challenges. In this context, technical knowledge a mere prerequisite for a mature approach to the digital. Focus is on the reflexive handling of social transformations revealed in questions of how everyday interactions, cultural, political and social contexts are changing as a result of the digital in the 21st century (Stalder 2016). Against this backdrop, experts speak of digital literacies in the plural form (Lanshear/Knobel et al. 2008), thereby emphasizing the need for multi-perspective approaches to ‘reading’ socio-cultural phenomena.
In the context of the digital, the term “literacies” refers – beyond the dimension of reading and writing skills – to the “ability to understand information in its various forms of appearances” (Lanham 1995). In order to understand complex images, sounds and syntactic nuances of words produced through the digital in their multi-dimensional, agile and fluid appearances, learners and lecturers need to create a new repertoire of analyzing.
Through the development of such digital literacies, subjects can be enabled to create connections between fragments and bytes and relate these to societal contexts.
New marginalisation and exclusion in context of university teaching and learning
A wide range of studies show how new forms of discrimination, marginalisation and exclusion become acute phenomena in the context of the digital world. When addressing topics of social justice and equal opportunities in universities, a focused reflection concerning the digital is required (Smythe 2018) to be addressed in collective and interdisciplinary fora for dialogue. Only in such environments, fragments can be closely analyzed in regard to their origins and contexts and brought into relation with other fragments – across disciplines.
We need to create new environments which promote opportunities to critically “read” the rapid development of new digital tools in terms of their ethical and social dimensions. Such reading spaces harbour the potential to create new diversity-oriented and heterogeneity-sensitive approaches; a movement which connects to the core aspirations of Critical Diversity Literacy. This reflection tool developed by Melissa Steyn focuses on “reading and understanding” the identities and cultural representations arising from unequal power relations, inviting collective thinking and acting, opening up perspectives for renegotiating and reshaping societal realities.
“Critical diversity literacy can be regarded as an informed analytical orientation that enables a person to ‘read‘ prevailing social relations as one would read text, recognizing the ways in which possibilities are being opened up or closed down for those differently positioned within the unfolding dynamics of specific social contexts.” (Steyn 2015)