Computer literacy – Teaching & Learning Research Initiative

Copy, cut, and paste: How does this shape what we know?

Introduction Copy, cut, and paste are functions naturalised and embedded across different software applications but are poorly understood as tools that shape our engagement with knowledge, culture and society in the 21st century (Livingstone, Wijnen, Papaioannou, Costa, & Grandio, 2014). Most people develop proficiency with ubiquitous software packages, such as those on cell phones, informally through their everyday engagement. Tertiary students as so-called “digital natives” (Prensky, 2001) are assumed to be able to translate this informally developed knowledge and skills into formal settings to successfully accomplish learning tasks. Educators often assume that students already possess the necessary skills and conceptual frameworks to learn with and through generic software packages, and tend

Literacy and e-learning: Mining the action research data

Introduction In this project, researchers and teachers (ECE, primary, and secondary) worked together to analyse unpublished data from a range of action research inquiries on e-learning to articulate, investigate, and build theory about the literacy learning that takes place in e-learning contexts. This summary report provides an overview of our cross-project analysis. The teachers’ case studies can be found at: http://elearning.tki.org.nz/teaching/Literacyin-e-learning Key findings There was evidence of students in all sectors (ECE, primary, and secondary) encoding and decoding, making meaning with, using, and thinking critically about texts in visual, audio, gestural, spatial, print, and multimodal modes. There was less evidence of students developing critical literacy, and this was so across all