Digital Literacy Contest

Years ago, in 2003 to be precise, I did a workshop on media literacy in Istanbul, Turkey. The whole workshop was a discussion about this concept of critically analyzing the content before allowing it to get into your skin. We were focusing on print and Television back then. I did not even think about the Internet.

Today, as we are in the Information Society, the concept of literacy has changed its form. Now we are talking about "Digital Literacy": Being able to critically analyze the information online. Digital literacy as for me is going beyond awareness of a single message or an image. It is being able to run multiple assessments at the same time in order to cherry pick the correct information among thousands of messages and images.

How can you know that you are a "digital literate" person? Well, you need some assessment plan for that.

Thanks to Daniel Poynter and his talented team, there is a fun way to measure your digital literacy skills. They have created a Digital Literacy Contest, where you are competing against time to find the correct information from the right online source.

We tried it today in the class that I help teach. They were like bees, finding all those information. And they did well. Much better than I did! Moreover, majority of my students seemed to enjoy the challenge very much (with only a couple of exceptions, naturally).

If I ever create a workshop on media literacy again, anywhere on Earth, I would definitely integrate Digital Literacy and this contest.