Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

This is the third part in a multi-part series about participants in the Race, Memory, and the Digital Humanities conference. This series features public intellectuals discussing digital literacy issues.


Professor Marisa Parham of Amherst College, who has led the Five College Digital Humanities initiative has a long history with digital media. “My earliest experiences with computers and devices mainly stemmed from my grandfather’s obsession with Kaypros in the 1980s. I was 8 or 9 years old. He would take me downtown to ogle what must have been some iteration of the Kaypro II, which for some reason, we found more intriguing than the Compaq II, though I remember thinking that the Compaq was hideous to behold.

Our opening keynote Helen Beetham talked about digital capabilities, which is becoming a well trodden phrase in higher education. Helen said that digital capability is the capacity to thrive in digital environments. Now this might seem simplistic, but actually, it's a profound idea, because there are many different digital environments, and many different ways of using them. This idea connects with my own recent comments on transliteracy - the ability to communicate ideas equally effectively, no matter what tools or technologies you use.

Inquiry-based learning is more than asking a student what he or she wants to know. It’s about triggering curiosity. And activating a student’s curiosity is, I would argue, a far more important and complex goal than the objective of mere information delivery.