Megan Dotson
October 10, 2007
Reference: Eshet-Alkali, Y., & Amichai-Hamburger, Y. (2004, August). Experiments in digital literacy. Cyberpsychology and Behavior, 7(4), 421-429.
After skimming through the pages of this article, I thought the information looked familiar, so I went back to week one and I found it 
. I have to say that when I first read this article, I was a bit confused in a lot of the areas. It was one of the first articles we read that pertained to digital literacy, so I was basically just getting familiar with what was meant by “digital literacy”. This article focuses on the five different skills involved in digital literacy: photo-visual skills, reproduction skills, branching skills, information skills, and socio-emotional skills. The purpose of this article is to inform the reader that digital literacy has become a “survival skill” in the technological era (421). Before reading this article, I never took into consideration how powerful that digital literacy has become in today’s society.
Now, weeks later after researching and reading all the information on literacy and digital literacy, I constantly think about how much has changed just seen I have grown up with technology. The internet is forever expanding and offering new and improved ways of doing pretty much everything, it’s somewhat overwhelming to think about all the changes that have taken place over time, and it makes me wonder what is in store for us 10 years from now. We are now acquiring better ways of communicating with one another, who needs a home telephone now, when you have access to wireless internet and cell phones. I can’t even think of a time when I have been going down the road and not look over and see someone on a phone. Although, when I’m home for the summer, weekend, or break from school, I kind of get a break from my cell phone considering I have no service in Mingo haha.
This article provides us with information along with an experiment that was conducted in order to help us realize that digital literacy is not equally shared among all age groups. The author wants us to also take into consideration that the younger generation doesn’t necessarily have more knowledge or in other words don’t consider them as more digital literate than the older generation. After the study was completed, the results indicated that after a digital literacy experiment involving 60 individuals that came from high school, college, and older college students. The results indicated that the younger participants performed better than the older ones, with photo-visual and branching literacy skills, whereas the older population were found to be more literate in reproduction and information literacy tasks. So therefore the younger population wasn’t anymore literate than the older population. I can understand in a better sense of how important it is for educators to focus on technical, cognitive, and sociological skills that are necessary to solve problems in these updated digital environments.
