Digital Cultures, Literacies and Schooling

Michele KnobelMontclair State University, USA

12 November, 2013Auditorio DIE, Mexico DF

Presentation as part of the Roundtable: “Nuevas technologíasen la escuela: Promeses y desafíos (“New Technologies in the school: Promises and challenges”

Introduction

Culture typically refers to the ways developed by specific groups of people for understanding and interpreting lived experiences. This includes ways of speaking about the world,acting creatively and imaginatively, and ways of using symbol systems to express ideas, represent experiences, convey information, and so on. Culture is defined by each group’s sets of shared values and beliefs, customs and rituals, norms and practices and patterns of social relations.

The rise of digital culture in the past three decades has seen a sizable shift in people’s ways of doing things, at least in countries with high levels of physical access to digital technologies and networks. “Digital culture” describes cultures that are mediated in significant ways by digital media, networks and other resources. Digital cultures tend to shape and be shaped by practices that engage and value networked collaboration, distributed expertise, sharing ideas and resources, and participation inendeavours by novices and experts alike. The concept of “digital culture” is a useful one because it reminds us thatdigital technology use entails much more than simply knowinghow to turn on a computer, access a website, or check one’s email; it is thoroughly enmeshed in how these technologies get used within and by different groups, the values and

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norms of the group or groups that use them, and what different groups choose to do with digital technologies to reach particular goals or to develop new understandings.

So, for example, within digital cultures that make use of video remixing (taking existing video and re-splicing it to create something new), groups that focus on using anime and commercial music as their source video material value particular kinds of transitions between clips (e.g., the ubiquitous “checkerboard effect” is disparaged by serious anime video remixers), the quality of the synch between the soundtrack and the video animation, and how layers of meaning can be added to an anime series by suggesting new relationships among characters or new events in their lives (Knobel, Lankshear and Lewis 2010). Specialist ways of talking about processes and effects within digital video editing are also important. Terms like “masking,” “importing” and “exporting clips, “frame”, “parent/child tracks” “keyframe controller area”, and the like, enable editors to talk very specifically about what they are doing and how they are doing it. Clearly, this involves much morethan simply cutting and pasting movie clips and adding a sound track.

Digital cultures have important implications for schools, which have shown a distressing tendency to focus on the latest electronic gadgetry (e.g., SmartBoards, tablets, one-to-one laptop configurations) without paying much attention at all to cultures of digital technology use outside of schools (Buckingham 2007; Gee and Hayes 2011). This also has significant implications for countries like Mexico that are investing heavily in digital technologies for schools (Kalman 2013). Attending to digital cultures makes it clear that only emphasizing technical proficiency in using computers, gadgets and the internet is insufficient for participating fully in the current digital age. When a concern with literacy is added to this mix, it also becomes apparent that just as certain “premium” forms of traditionalliteracy (e.g., argumentation, abstraction, logic) are more

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valued than other forms in school and many workplace cultures, so, too, are “premium” forms of digital literacy valued in digital cultures and often afford important benefits to users and opportunities to participate more fully in a practice (see Gee 2013).

In this presentation, I briefly discuss analog and digital cultures as a way of setting the scene for examining “premium” digital literacies and their implications for becoming truly adept within a practice. In the end, I argue that teachers and schools need to attend to the ways in which highly valued digital literacies are being developed within online cultures, and make space for students to develop both premium traditional literacy and premium digital literacy in order for any claims that schools are preparing students for the 21st century to hold water.

Analogue and Digital Cultures

In order to properly understand “digital culture” it is important to first examine “analogue culture”. For much of human history, culture has been analogue in nature. That is, human culture—everything genetically non-inheritable—has been based in a physical world where atoms rule, and, in response, humans have developed concepts, frameworks, laws, assumptions, procedures and so on for handling myriad aspects of the physical world (Lankshear andKnobel 2003). The materiality of atoms means that copies ofthings are produced mechanically and are limited in number and material artifacts are the dominant trade goods (aside from money). Analogue culture is marked by physical boundaries and borders, by paper and pen and physical books,by typesetting and printing machines, by broadcast media, and value is a function of scarcity rather than abundance. It often requires in-person presence (e.g., shopping, meetings, banking, workplaces) and it often emphasizes individual intelligence, creativity and authorship.

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In terms of literacy practices within recent analogue culture, for example, authors write books which are published under contract by companies—who are responsible for the size of the book, its layout and font, where it is printed and how it is shipped and marketed. Fan fiction writers in analogue culture create postal networks with other writers in order to share their narratives, or attend conventions in person, bringing copies of their work to distribute and share with others (Jenkins 2010; Knobel and Lankshear 2002). People producing remixed videos within analogue culture run two video machines—one to play the desired video (in cassette format) and the other to record the desired segments in the desired order. Or they physically splice sections of film together to create something new (Knobel, Lankshear and Lewis 2010). Copies of analogue books, fan narratives and remixed videos are all physical and are shared only as far as one’s physical or market networks allow.

Analogue culture is quite different to digital culture. Digital culture is characterised by bits, rather than atoms;that is, by the binary code (i.e., 0s and 1s) that comprisesthe primary architectural “states” of digitality. A now apocryphal story about the difference between analogue atomsand digital bits comes from Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab (1995). Negroponte arrived at a conference in the early 1990s where attendees needed to register their laptop computers with the conference venue. The check-in person asked for the value of the laptop (in case it was lost or stolen) and Negroponte valued it at $1-2 million USD. The check-in clerk disputed this amount quite strongly and askedwhat brand it was, whereupon she assigned it a value of $2000. The clerk was thinking terms of atoms—the make and age of the laptop, and the replacement value of the hardware. Negroponte was thinking in terms of the digital contents stored on the laptop’s harddrive in the form of ideas, research proposals, and patent potentials etc. which to him were worth (potentially) $1-2 million. The difference

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between atoms and bits also applies to analogue and digital cultures.

In contrast to analogue cultures, digital cultures—facilitated by hardware, operating systems, software, digital networks and services, and binary code—are spaces where abundance over scarcity has value, where copies can bemade with the click of a mouse and shared with unknown others in farflung places with another click, and where collaboration on a scale never before possible occurs all the time. Binary coding and the programming languages it hasspawned makes digital things much easier to manipulate, change, tinker with, and muck around with than analogue things (Miller, 2011). Digital culture means that people are no longer merely consumers of broadcast media, but are actively generating and sharing their own do-it-yourself media. Mobilizing crowds of strangers to attend or protest an event can be done in 140 characters or less when posted to Twitter, and discussing news events or playing games synchronously with people physically located in many different countries has become commonplace. Books, for example, now come in digital form, too, and can be read online using a computer, or downloaded to a portable tablet and read on the go. Online libraries of free and low-cost books (e.g., FeedBooks.com, Gutenburg.org, OpenCulture.com),as well as spaces where readers comment on and review books read (e.g., GoodReads.com) now proliferate as popular resources and spaces in which to participate. Fan fiction writers now have dedicated online affinity spaces in which to post and share their stories with readers around the world; and obtain reader feedback appended to each installation of their narratives that an then be used to improve their writing (Black 2008; Curwood 2013). Remixing media, for example, has been greatly facilitated by access to free sound, image, and video editing software and the development of spaces online that resource such endeavours without fear of infringing copyright laws and the like (e.g., CreativeCommons.org). Online “portals” developed by aficionados rather than by commercial companies also help

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people to share their remixed work with others and obtain feedback on the quality of their work, too (e.g., AnimeMusicVideos.org). Sharing someone’s work online is as easy as copy and pasting a link to it into a post on a social networking site, or on Twitter, a blog, via instant messaging, or even texting it to someone to view on their smartphone.

There is a second distinction to be made here as well between Digital Culture (with capital letters) and digital culture (with lower case letters). Digital Culture is often described in the media and cultural studies literature as a singular, “macro” phenomenon that comprises a globally shared “set of values, practices, and expectations regardingthe way people (should) act and interact within the contemporary network society” (Deuze 2006: 63; see also Jenkins and Deuze 2008; Davies and Razlogova, 2013). This Digital Culture was described almost twenty years ago by a very prescient Manuel Castells (1996) as an “historically new reality” (p. 92)—one that is “fundamentally altering theway we are born, we live, we sleep, we produce, we consume, we dream, we fight, or we die” (p. 31).

Digital culture also can be understood as plural, too, in much the same way as we are able to talk about different andvarious human cultures. Digital cultures (in the plural and with lower case letters) operates at this more micro level, and are shape and are shaped by a particular group of people’s ways of sharing an interest or passion, the resources they prefer to use, the values and beliefs that bring them together and maintain general group cohesiveness,their norms of conduct and expression, the practices they value and engage in, and patterns of social relations and interactions that characterise “how things get done” within this culture. Examples include hacker culture—originally applied to newspaper journalists and now taken to mean computer programmers who like to walk on the illegal side ofprogramming and gaining access to others’ computers and programs. Another example is digital remixing culture—where

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anything digital already in existence is edited and changed,while maintaining enough of the original content in a recognizable form, to create a new text, song, image, game, video, and so on. Even specific online spaces and services like Twitter and Wikipedia have developed cultures of participation that constrain and promote particular ways of writing and interacting with others, with some of these waysimposed by the service itself and others emerging from users’ preferences and practices. Twitter is part of the blogging digital culture and has developed its own symbol system for conveying information—with many of these symbols generated by users themselves and taken up by others who found them useful, too (e.g., the hashtag to denote a searchterm; “@Twittername” used to indicate a post is directed at a specific user; “RT” used to indicate that someone else’s post is being re-posted or “re-tweeted” by another). The digital culture of Twitter values pithy statements and wry humour, as well as breaking news and eyewitness accounts of serious events. Wikipedia requires contributors to write in encyclopedic-like language and to comment on substantial edits on the “Talk” page attached to each entry. Biographiesof still-living people are discouraged, and some controversial topics are locked in order to stop editing “wars” between opposing viewpoints (the entry on Scientologyis a case in point). Participating in these spaces means taking on the cultural values and practices particular to these endeavours and agreeing to abide by them/practice them. This more micro conception of digital cultures is whatframes this paper.

As a final point, analogue and digital cultures are not at all mutually exclusive, but occur side by side, and even overlap or blur into each other at times (cf., Buechley et al. 2013). And sometimes analogue cultures can be dressed upin digital garb and made to look like they belong to a different culture, when they actually don’t. Schools are notorious for this kind of thing and have a long history of taking old practices and simply digitizing them—such as worksheets and multiple choice tests completed on iPads, or

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internet-based drill and skill exercises accessed via computers—without attending to the deep changes called into play by Digital Culture and digital cultures. Nonetheless, understanding digital cultures and all they entail—includingtheir ways of speaking, writing, expressing and sharing ideas and resources, and interacting with others—remains fundamentally important to any claim concerning the effective preparation of students for the world as it currently is, and as it will be once they graduate.

Conventional and Premium Traditional Literacies; Conventional and Premium Digital Literacies

James Paul Gee (2013) usefully distinguishes between two “grades” of traditional literacy learned in schools and helps to clarify what’s currently at stake. The first grade is akin to “functional” literacy; it prepares learners for what have become relatively low-status and low-paying jobs and not for going on to university studies. This wasn’t a problem when low-paying jobs were available, stable and satisfying, but increasingly, low-paying jobs are not enoughto live on any more. Conventional traditional literacy oftenis linked to “reading comprehension,” where students read passages and retell the gist of the text or answer questionsabout what was in the text. Little attention is paid to how texts are read differently by different people in different contexts for different purposes (cf., the bible read by a fundamentalist, liberationist, Catholic, or Protestant Christian; cf., Lankshear and Knobel 2011). Traditional literacy teaching focuses on things like fluency and phonic knowledge. Information texts often are introduced by reviewing a list of “vocabulary” words taken from the text that are deemed to be potentially difficult for students, but presented in isolation from the text and its content as though words always stand on their own when it comes to their meaning.

The second, or premium, grade of traditional literacy entails learning to use academic language appropriately (Gee

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2013: 59). Gee argues that premium literacy emphasizes “forms of language used in research, empirical reasoning, and logical argumentation” (ibid.), which are highly valued in schools, universities and in many well-paying, high-status jobs. Premium traditional literacy includes being able to write about abstract phenomena and supporting claimsmade about these phenomena with reference to empirical research or to other texts that have argued similar things. It also includes being able to use and structure a range of academic genres (e.g., argument, exposition, opinion essays,factual descriptions), and choose the one that best suits a given task or purpose.

Gee extends these two grades of literacy to digital literacies. For Gee, conventional digital literacy focuses only on proficiency with using hardware and different software applications, being able to use a search engine, knowing how to archive digital materials and so on. Premium digital literacy, in contrast, concerns “being able to use specialist/technical language connected to digital tools” (Gee, 2013, p. 60). That is, being able to use specialist terms and their meanings appropriately within a domain of activity; like “hue” and “layering” when working with Adobe Photoshop. Becoming fluent users of premium digital literacies typically involves young people in participating deeply in shared-interest or affinity spaces online, where they have direct access to resources, mentors who are themselves a diverse mix of “newbies/beginners” and experts”, tutorials and trouble-shooting guides, and the like. In many ways, this conception of premium digital literacies captures the specialist language uses found within a range of digital cultures that support high-value proficiency and knowledge within a field or domain of endeavor. Returning to the example of Adobe Photoshop mentioned earlier, Gee and Hayes (2013; see also Gee 2013: Ch. 11) recount the experience of one young girl, enrolled in an afterschool “tech savvy” club, who wanted to take images of real world clothes and convert them into clothes for her characters to wear within the virtual world game,

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The Sims. The people at the club didn’t know how to do this themselves, but had heard it was possible using Adobe Photoshop and its image editing tools (Gee, 2013, p. 147). So the young girl downloaded a version of Adobe Photoshop and taught herself how to do it. She honed her skills to thepoint where she began uploading her remixed virtual clothes to share with other Sims players and “soon had over 300 people using and praising her clothes” (Gee 2013: 147). Honing her photoshopping skills was a highly complex task and she needed to develop “knowledge of concepts like texture, layering, mesh, hue, perspective, and design.” (Gee2013: 147). Part of this was made possible simply through using the software itself, which has key terms built into it. Part of it came through participating in photoshopping discussion boards where specialist terms were very much partof people’s ways of speaking to each other about particular processes, effects and outcomes. Gee argues that these specialist terms are in effect “higher order tools” for working within a particular endeavor or practice (Gee 2013: 151). For example, words like “layering”, “hue” and “mesh” all mean something very particular within the practice of photo editing. Understanding what these words mean in practice means “the young girl can extend, discuss, and eventually come to be able to explicate her knowledge. She can ask questions, make claims, and interact with other emerging and accomplished experts (on Sims sites, for instance). The words become themselves tools for foregrounding and leveraging aspects of the real world, as well as aspects of an explicit knowledge-building process” (Gee 2013: 152). Engaging in and becoming “good at” a premium digital literacy, like that of photoshopping, enables a user or participant to become an “insider” to a digital culture, and to continue honing their craft and understanding at more and more sophisticated levels. Indeed,as Gee also argues, premium digital literacies flourish in the world outside school and are producing “all sorts of media, citizen science, and knowledge in competition with experts via collaborative problem-solving communities on theInternet” (Gee, 2013: 60).

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Gee’s identification of premium traditional literacy and premium digital literacy also helps us to see that there aredigital cultures that are useful for developing both kinds of literacy simultaneously.

Two examples: /r/AskHistorians and Wikipedia (our Masters students)

Reddit’s AskHistorians Sub-Reddit

Reddit is an online social news and entertainment website where content is generated by users, who post and comment about truly anything and everything, Members also upvote or downvote each others’ submissions which generates a ranking for posts and comments within posts in terms of visibility (i.e., reaching the “front page” of the site is a major goalfor many posters). Reddit itself comprises an enormous number of “sub-reddits” which are sections of the website (they have their own fixed URL) that are organized around a particular shared interest or topic. Popular subreddits include /r/funny, /r/wtf, /r/pics and /r/AdviceAnimals. Reddit content, as expected, can be highly controversial, offensive, or beyond banal. Many sub-reddits, however, have developed a particular set of norms and practices for their users that are often quite tightly enforced in order to maintain the integrity of content and as part of a deep valuing of informed commentary. One of these is /r/AskHistorians (http://www.reddit.com/r/askhistorians). /r/AskHistorians is a forum that’s open to all Reddit users for asking and discussing questions that are rarely addressed in school history textbooks. Recent questions include:

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I'm a dockhand, working in a big city somewhere in Europe in the 15th or 16th century. Who is my employer,how did I get the job, and how do I get paid?

Why did world population growth slow in 1959 and 1960? Did the Mafia ever really use ‘cement shoes’?

This sub-reddit currently has well over 200,000 formal subscribers and many more readers (who don’t comment or vote), and is rather strict about the quality of posts and comments. This group explicitly advises users that they use standards from Historiography and the Historical Method to asses answers (AskHistorians 2013). Posts and comments not meetings these standards are deleted. The standards operating within this particular digital culture can be gleaned from the space’s use rules (AskHistorians 2103) and from comments about the quality of posts (usually made by moderators to explain why a comment has been deleted). They include:

writing responses that are comprehensive and informative

citing and quoting sources in support of claims is valued and encouraged

comments are more than one line long and provide detailed explanations

deal directly to the topic of the question asked being factually correct presenting strong arguments no sweeping generalizations no speculation comments should not be flippant, sexist or hateful,

one-line answers, or grounded in unsubstantiated theories

Within this context of people who are really dedicated to having informed and erudite discussions about history, it isvery easy as even just a reader to absorb some of the specialist language used by historians to talk about their work, their methods and their area of interest. Terms such

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as “validate”, “source” (i.e., academic), “primary source” (historical document), “leap in logic”, “claim” all appear frequently in comments and are used by people to support particular versions of events, descriptions of people or times, or to critique each other’s comments and claims in aninformed way that is valued by the historians who frequent this online discussion space. These terms and the meanings behind them enable non-historians to obtain a sense of what it means to be an historian and to practice reading and writing history. It also enables non-historians and historians alike to engage with each others’ ideas and positions in scholarly ways.

Participating in these discussions also requires an understanding of how the Reddit discussion space itself works, including the digital tools that is uses. Users need to know how to access their set of use rules via clicking ona text box. They need to know that clicking on a hyperlink entry on the front page of the sub-reddit will “open” the discussion associated with that link for viewing. They need to understand terms like “flair” (special tags appended to regular posters’ names to identify their historical area of specialization) and the role of “up arrows” (casting a vote for a post considered insightful and useful) and “down arrows” (tools used to rank posts that aren’t insightful or useful). It requires understanding is what a “top-level” response is (i.e., responds directly to the original poster), and what is a “second level” response (i.e., buildson someone else’s comment). /r/AskHistorians straddles a culture of historical research and writing and a (particularvariant of) digital culture of informed online discussion. It is also a space that promotes both premium traditional literacy and premium digital literacy. The premium traditional literacy being practiced within this online discussion space comprises specialist terms from historians’practice and the standards set for asking questions and responding to them. This very much contrasts with schools’ typical approaches to reading history textbooks, where the lesson often begins with an introduction to “vocabulary”

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taken from the text and defined for students to help with their “reading comprehension”. The premium digital literacy engendered by /r/AskHistorians concerns knowing how to participate effectively within a relatively serious and weighty-yet-accessible online discussion of a specified topic. It includes knowing what to click on to post a question, or to post a response or comment. It includes knowing how to read and talk about nested comments and sort out different lines of argument based on posting times and dates and who is responding to whom. This contrasts markedlywith school uses of content delivery services like Blackboard and WebCT where the discussion boards are often haphazard, deeply unsatisfying affairs with very little depth of ideas or argument, and with top level and second level comments often confused and confusing.

Writing for Wikipedia

Another online space that develops both premium traditional literacy and premium digital literacy is Wikipedia.org. Wikipedia is a massively collaborative online encyclopedia. Users are more or less free to create new entries, edit existing ones, add or update details as things change over time, flag entries for deletion, argue over categories and orientations used within entries, and so on. Wikipedia is a wiki, and as such, is part of a particular digital culture of collaborative writing. A wiki is a collection of webpageswhose content is typically organized around a particular purpose, topic or theme. Content can be collaboratively written, added to, deleted, and modified by users. Wikis arenot like traditional webpages that are controlled behind-the-scenes by webmasters or a website owner. They are much more like a shared, online writing space that support embedded images, videos and sound, as well as hyperlinks to pages within the wiki or outside it. Each wiki page often will have a number of tabs associated with it; one that shows the content as it appears onscreen, one that converts this content into its “raw” source or HTML code for editing purposes; one that comprises a discussion space for

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discussing edits made to the page etc.; and one that shows the history of who has edited the page (and from which a page can be reverted back to earlier versions). Users typically need to know some basic wiki coding language in order to be able to format the text they add, change fonts and styles, add colour, include media, and the like.

Wikipedia, contrary to popular belief, is not an “anything goes” type of space. It has very explicit expectations regarding writing quality and what can be written about. Forexample, with respect to the latter, some controversial topics are “locked” and only specified editors can change them (e.g., the page on Scientology); living person biographies need to be well-justified in order to stop personal profile pages proliferating within the encyclopedia. Content must be “worthy of notice” (Wikipedia 2013a; emphasis added) and, to be included, topics must have“received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject” (Wikipedia 2013a). Topics must be supported by verifiable evidence (ibid.). Entries must be well-written and engaging, topic coverage needs to be comprehensive and backed up by thorough research. Claims made in the entry need to be verifiable or well-supported bycitations. Language used in the text should be neutral and address all dimensions of a topic, not just the writer’s ownpreferred version or position (Wikipedia 2013b). The structure of each entry should comprise a “lead” section that summarizes the topic and “sets the scene” for what follows. The entry should include subsections with appropriate subheadings to help guide the reader. Citations need to be consistently formatted throughout the entry, too.Failure to meet these conditions can mean one’s entry is deleted by editors. Changes made to entries can also be discussed and argued over in a linked “Discussion” page. Without a doubt, writing clearly and well about a topic, writing concisely and in a neutral, balanced manner and verifying or supporting claims and accounts of events are all valued within this space. In many ways, these writing practices can be described as premium traditional literacies

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as they promote well-structured descriptions and explanations, balanced coverage of a topic, verifying one’s claims and sources, and conducting comprehensive background research prior to writing. These practices have long been valued in schools, higher education and in many professions.

There is also important premium digital literacy learning that can take place with Wikipedia, too. This includes knowing how to switch between the various tabs available on each entry page within the encyclopedia (e.g., leer, ver fuente, ver historial). The “leer” tab shows a nicely formatted text and is easy to read. The “ver fuente” tab shows the coding “language” behind the “leer” page. Wikipedia provides a comprehensive overview of codes used toformat text and users need to teach themselves how to use these codes in order to be able to be able to fine-tune the format of their text (Wikipedia.org 2013c). Clicking on the “ver historial” tab generates a list of user changes made tothe text. This list can show how recently updated an entry is, whether there have been “editing wars” in terms of page content, whether one user has dominated the content, and so on. Understanding how to navigate the “inner workings” of Wikipedia, how to be able to physically edit text and images, and how to format text within a wiki environment hasexcellent transferability to other wikis. Many fans for example, have established popular wikis about their passion (e.g., Star Wars fan wiki: http://swfanon.wikia.com); many computer games, for example, have fan-generated wikis that help and support playing the game (e.g., Kingdom of Loathing’s game guide wiki: http://kol.coldfront.net/thekolwiki). How-to wikis are also very popular online (e.g., WikiHow.com), language-related wikis are, too (e.g., the multilingual online dictionary: Wiktionary.org). All of these wikis comprise user-generated,collaboratively written content and participating in each requires a solid understanding the digital tools, specialistterms and their meanings, and writing and editing practices used and within these pages.

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Interestingly, a number of Masters-levels classes I taught with Colin Lankshear a few years ago focused on collaboratively researching the digital culture of Wikipediaand what is entailed in writing an effective entry to contribute to the encyclopedia (Lankshear and Knobel 2011). Students were required to then writing an entry that wasn’t deleted by core editors responsible for overseeing the quality of work in their designated areas of focus. Despite all of the participants in these courses being practicing teachers, with many of them teaching non-fiction forms of writing to their own students, a good number of their contributions to the encyclopedia were deleted or were not even “passed’ for publication on the wiki, as their entries did not meet Wikipedia’s writing or notability standards. All of the groups marveled at how difficult it was to write Wikipedia texts and were surprised at how much work went into writing entries that didn’t get deleted. They also commented on how learning to format their entries using wikiHTML code was something they’d never considered they’d be able to do due to their limited experience with creating webpages from scratch, or participating in other wikis. For us, this teaching experience threw sharp light onto a very real gap between the kinds of texts and writing styles theseteachers were teaching in their classrooms and the kinds of texts and writing styles that are highly valued in out-of-school spaces. I argue that spaces like Wikipedia encourage a form of premium traditional literacy. The digital culturesof wikis and their wide spread popular appeal also means that understanding and being able to use the technical toolsof wikis and their specialist terms counts as a premium digital literacy as well; and one that should really be attended to much more explicitly in schools.

ConclusionOne of the questions underlying this mesa this evening is “¿Qué cambios culturales están teniendo lugar, y cómo podrian las escuelas reubicarse frente a estos desafíos?” Inthe case of digital cultures, it is not so much a matter of cultural change as taking on new cultures within the ambit

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of schooling that matters. Schools continue to have an important role to play in engaging students in learning premium grade traditional literacies (e.g., logical argumentation, abstract reasoning) and an increasingly important role in enabling students to access, use and practise using premium digital literacies. This requires much more of teachers than simply teaching “reading comprehension” or how to structure an essay using five paragraphs. It also require much more than traditional “computer literacy” approaches that tend to focuses on typing skills and how to use particular software applications like word processing applications, video editing software or sound recording software.

Indeed, long standing divides between students who are able to access premium traditional literacy and those who are notappear to be playing out with respect to digital literacy and premium digital literacy, too (Gee, 2013). That is, manystudents in school only have access to a “functional”, technicist kind of one-size-fits all kind literacy and, as such, have less chance of entering higher education or of obtaining employment in a job that pays well enough. Students that do have access to premium traditional literacyhave often acquired much of this at home in their engagementwith older, more experienced literacy mentors, and simply continue to practice this premium literacy in school (Gee 2013; Heath 1983). This same gap will increasingly hold truefor students whose engagement with digital technologies in schools excludes engagement with the digital cultures that make use of these technologies in particular ways and for particular purposes, using specialist terms to describe digital tools and processes and which, in turn, contributes to one’s ability to speak in more precise and informed ways about the work one is doing and how one is going about it.

In short, bringing together digital technologies and literacy requires teachers to engage students in exploring digital cultures as “insiders”—attending to the ways in which symbol systems are used to convey meanings, the values

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and norms of the culture, the tools and specialist terms andthe ways in which they are used to meet particular goals, and so on—if students are indeed to be prepared effectively for living in the 21st century.

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