Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

Most graduate writers who are struggling with their writing are actually struggling with their thinking. It isn’t a psychological block, but rather the intellectual confusions endemic to the process of communicating sophisticated research. To Rachael Cayley, these confusions are real and can have deleterious consequences for writing, but when we treat these problems as conceptual problems in our thinking we create the space to use writing as a strategy to solve them. The writer’s block label may just be further alienating us from our own writing; write your way out.

Did you hear about these two University of Virginia grad students who rescued a long-standing academic relic from imminent destruction? Their institution’s expansive and outdated library card catalog -- which enjoyed a heyday as a bona fide workhorse before it was decommissioned 31 years ago -- grew to consume an unwieldy 68 cabinets’ worth of space. When it was determined that digital archiving would be too costly, Neal Curtis and Sam Lemley, both Ph.D. candidates in literature, devised a more economical storage option to allow future researchers and historians to access the rich low-tech data that otherwise would have been destroyed.

One of these skills is, writing. Writing helps one to reflect and to clarify ideas which may otherwise be transient and consequently lost to the learner. Writing helps one to make sense of our experiences, our learning and how one can best relate the learning experience to the world outside the classroom.  In many ways, the act of writing, of reflecting, is learning by doing - something all learners need to have experience of.