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Digital Literacies: Concepts, Policies and Practices Edited by Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel Peter Lang, 2008, 321 pp., ISBN 978-1-4331-0168-7
In this edited collection, Lankshear and Knobel explore the concepts, policies, and practices that comprise the complexities of digital literacy. The volume includes 12 chapters written by authors from different parts of the world. The authors examine the "literacies of the digital" (Martin, chapter 7), such as: functional Internet literacy (Johnson, chapter 2), digital competence (Soby, chapter 6), and trajectories of remixing (Erstad, chapter 8). Informed by a sociocultural perspective, Lankshear and Knobel offer a defi nition of digital literacy as a "myriad [of] social practices and conceptions of engaging in meaning making mediated by texts that are produced, received, distributed, exchanged, etc., via digital codifi cation" (p. 5). They admit to the ever-expanding network of digital literacy practices and suggest that we henceforth refer to digital literacy as digital literacies.
Chapters 1-4 provide an overview of the origins, concepts, and defi nitions of digital literacy. This section covers much terrain, from understanding how the literacies associated with technological practices might be considered digital literacy, to defi ning the relationships between media literacy and digital literacies. For instance, Bawden (chapter 1) highlights four core components of digital literacy: underpinnings (traditional skills of computer literacy), background knowledge (how digital/nondigital information is produced and communicated), central competencies (basic skills and competences of digital/nondigital formats) and attitudes and perspectives (how digital literacy is learned based on individual situations). Johnson (chapter 2) recognizes the cognitive skills that comprise "functional Internet literacy," while Fieldhouse and Nicholas (chapter 3) explore what it means to be information savvy and examine how "information literacy is a fundamental part of...