On The Conversation, Divina Frau-Meigs, coordinator of the TRANSLIT research program, presents the main results of this program.
TRANSLIT aimed to "understand the uses and learning to master information (as data, news and document) in the digital world".
This research was largely articulated around the notion of transliteracy, defined as "the mastery of the three information cultures: media, information, and computing.
- Infomedia involves editorial and critical skills (writing, publishing and disseminating).
- InfoDoc emphasizes organizational skills (search, verify, and navigate).
- Info-data promotes operative skills (coding, design, participation)".
Digital: "a complex multimodal arrangement of the three literacies associated with the three information cultures: media, information, and computer"
The observation focused, in particular, on young people aged 15 to 18, in school and extracurricular situations (in "third places") in order to identify the skills used by the students as well as by the trainers in their knowledge construction.- In the school situation, " practices are more about hybridization and contamination of activity models and references between digital and "paper" (tree structures, color codes, indexing, cultural references). (...) The reuse of non-academic skills, particularly digital ones, depends heavily on the attitude of teachers, whether encouraging or not, and on the support they can provide to reduce the stress caused in many students by the feeling of incompetence. This is a break with the presupposition of the skills of digital natives: being connected is not enough to be competent.
- In the extracurricular situation, in the "third places", " the co-construction and co-regulation of practices are developed de facto when the pedagogical representations of the participants allow it. The more school representations are prevalent, the more the creativity and multimodal practices of the learners are restricted. The interpersonal and proactive approach of the mediators within the device is the one that triggers or, on the contrary, curbs the interaction within the space invested through digital uses".
The surveys carried out within the framework of TRANSLIT thus highlight "the need to support students' infocommunicational activities: a "relaxed" and utilitarian relationship with technologies is not enough. The mastery of digital tools cannot be improvised and the deficit of general culture in relation to the digital world must also be filled in order to get out of the current unthinking, underpinned by representations in which "the digital world" dominates without however being considered as an object of knowledge and competence".
"The results point to a very heterogeneous French situation, with risks of increasing the digital divide, but also with progress in identifying the obstacles and factors facilitating the digital transition.They draw attention to the crucial point of articulation between multimodality and transliteracy and alert to the need to map and "reference" the required skills.
The research project TRANSLIT, started in March 2013 and finished in December 2016, for a duration of 36 months, extended by 9 months. It received a grant from the French National Research Agency (ANR) of €286,000.
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