Digital Literacies on campus conversation

At the start of the event, Dr.Maha asked a question which held most of the arguments. The question was ” what are the key benefits of developing digital literacies?”. Some people took part in answering the question by mentioning different benefits. As for me, one of the most interesting key benefit mentioned was the importance of copyrights. We as students use information & pictures in our daily assignments without thinking that it might be actually considered unethical and online fraud!. The problem is that most of us are not really aware of the importance of copyright and online privacy. As Dr.Maha mentioned in her article ” Critical Digital Citizenship: Promoting empathy and social justice online”, that there are concerns about the privacy online and that we need to be sure of the information we spread share. i never really knew the importance of copyrights and that i have to be sure that everything i use or share is permitted by the owner or publisher.

Also another topic that was mentioned in the talk that i personally found interesting is explaining the difference between a digital skill and digital literacy. We took part in an activity where there was different digital skills and techniques shown on the slides and everyone votes whether its a skill or digital literacy which was a fun yet informative activity because it made me understand more the difference between both topics which also made realize that most of us as students need to be enlightened about such topics in uni because later no one will teach us these kind of things. Moreover, in the blog post by Dr.Maha, she explained why teaching digital literacies to students is important or otherwise we would be learning skills and not knowing how and when to use it. I was enlightened by this new information as it was the first time to know the difference between both and understand it well! I think now every-time i use a digital skill i already have i will take it a step further and try to understand the digital literacy behind it.

In my opinion, after reading both the article and the blog and also attending the talk i can say that there is a need to increase the awareness about digital literacies and about the importance of protecting your online data. People need to be aware how to protect their info and what to share for the public. they need to gain skills on what platforms they should use, when and how because there are other people all around the world reading this info and interacting with it so we must be careful to prevent online abuse.

https://literacyworldwide.org/blog/literacy-daily/2016/02/03/knowing-the-difference-between-digital-skills-and-digital-literacies-and-teaching-both

Critical Digital Citizenship: Promoting Empathy and Social Justice Online