TASK: QUESTION ONE

The 5 fluency skills

 

What is digital fluency?

Digital fluency is the ability to have leverage over technology in order to create new knowledge, produce new challenges and problems and to complement these with crucial problem solving and critical thinking skills to solve the new challenges. The digital fluency skills as identified by Crockett, Jukes and Churches (2011), are basically essential skills that will help you adapt to changing environments as technology develops.

Figure 1: (Medium, 2018)

Why are digital fluency skills important?

Living in an increasing digitized society we all have the right to participate in a digitally-enabled education system. Having digital fluency enables us to keep ourselves safe online as well as taking full advantage of life chance opportunities. Being digitally fluent will enable you to have access to services quicker and easier (as most public and private services move online), and will help you obtain jobs; participate meaningfully in society and learn new things every day. Digital access is essential in ones development of digital fluency skills and without access it might become very difficult to learn and majority of the learning process is practical and learnt through trial and error. Below are five fluency skills that a digitally fluent person would have:

Figure 2: (Medium, 2018)

      Information fluency

Information fluency is the set of skills needed to locate, retrieve, assess and use information to solve problems and become independent lifelong learners. It is having the ability to unconsciously interpret all types of information in any kind of format that will enable us to draw out the essential knowledge, comprehend with regards to meaning and significance of the information and utilize it to complete our tasks and assessments. 

 Figure 3: (Megapixl, 2020)

Information fluency involves 5 steps:

 

Step 1: Ask good questions

Step 2: Determine where the information is

Step 3: Organise, triangulate and summarise the various sources

Step 4: Apply the knowledge obtained to the real world problem you are faced with.

Step 5: Reflecting on what went well and what could have been done better.

 

For example your lecturer has given you a task to complete and in order to complete that task you have to do some research on the internet. However there may be many different answers on the internet and most of the websites won’t give you what you’re looking for. Therefore, to have information fluency means to be able to sort out information that will be useful to you from the information that will be useless to you. Thereafter, formulate your answers and evaluate.

Solution fluency

Briefly put, solution fluency is solving a problem presented to us through an intuitive process. It calls for the ability to interpret information and extract knowledge so that we can find a solution to the problem at hand. Solution fluency is the process of using the knowledge gathered to visualise and formulate a suitable solution.

Figure 4: (Centage, 2020)

This intuitional process is more commonly known as the 6-D process which is to:

Step 1: Define the problem

Step 2: Discover the problem by looking at the problem from all angles.

Step 3: Dream where we are and how we got here and imagine what the solution will be in the future.

Step 4: Design and plan how to make the solution a reality.

Step 5: Deliver, produce and publish your design plan.

Step 6: Debrief, the evaluation process of all the steps.

An example with the use of these steps:

Step 1: how do I manage my time better by balancing out my campus work and social life?

Figure 5: (Best sample resume, 2015)

Step 2: find out what I spend most of my time doing during the day.  Watching television? Chatting with my friends on social media? Is social media a distraction for me?

Step 3: a possible solution would be allocating certain hours of my days to my campus work and the rest of the day will be allocated to socializing and “me time”.

Step 4: if you work better and feel more comfortable working in the afternoons then allocate as much time as you feel you need maybe from 16:00 to 20:00 with breaks in between but not spending your breaks on social media. But if you work more efficiently in the mornings then you can allocate your time accordingly.

Step 5: take action and actually follow through on your chosen schedule.

Step 6: identify any more changes you think you should make to your schedule that will help you manage your time better. Evaluate.

      Media fluency

Media fluency refers to the ability to explicate the meaning of any communication and to direct the message of an intended audience. In simple terms media fluency involves interpreting the different forms of media and how we can use this information for our own output/gain. 

Figure 6: (ID 360, 2013)

There are two components to media fluency:

• Listen- Break down the communication into their separate components: the media and the message so that you are able to critically analyse the message independently to make sure that you don’t get influenced by media. You need to verbalise the message and verify how trustworthy or genuine the information provided is.
• Leverage- gain complete understanding of the most fitting media you’ve chosen for your message and take into account the content and outcome of it. Give thought to your audience, the pre-determined criteria and your abilities.

 

For example, you’re making a poster to invite your classmates to an accounting intervention that you’re hosting. You will have to first look at the content and important information you’re going to put on the poster for instance the address. Then you have to add pictures and make the poster look attractive to capture their attention and set a welcoming tone. Then you could print out the poster and place it wherever your classmates can see or convert the document to a picture and send it to your class group chat. You also need to look at what you are able to do for instance you can’t have a banner in the sky to advertise it as its too costly and some of your students will see it.

Creative Fluency

Creative fluency is a process of giving meaning and adding value to things through the use of art, design and storytelling. It is an imaginative process that makes use of artistic skills with the use of both your left and right hemispheres. The 5 I’s are involved in this process:

Figure 7: (New common, 2020)

•  Identify: Try to figure out the problem at hand. Pick out the key words and begin to form questions around them. Brainstorm, think laterally, etc.

• Inspire: Absorb ample sensory information such as shapes, images, sounds and colours. Indulge yourself in a creative environment.

• Interpolate: The ability to establish connections and relationships. Find patterns within known information.

• Imagine: Build images, concepts and sensations in your mind that cannot be discovered through sight.

• Inspect: examine your attempt and the product created. Evaluate and figure out ideas on how to improve and apply your new ideas to future challenges you may face.

For example, you are in charge of serving the food at a function that all your college friends are invited to. So your first step would be to identify your problem: How to serve healthy delicious food they would eat. Then you would probably search online or through recipe books to find out what kind of food would be appropriate and appetizing for the function. Thereafter you would want to find out what drinks would go with the food and how it should be plated. Imagine that dinner table and how you want it to look on the function day. Evaluate your dishes and combinations and whether they are good enough for your mates and see what you could improve on.

Collaboration Fluency

In a nutshell, collaboration fluency is the ability to successfully work and interact with your fellow classmates, employees, etc. in the digital environment as well as in person in the physical environment. Collaboration fluency includes the 5 E’s:

Figure 8: (League, 2016)

Figure 9: (Start up talky, 2020)

• Establish: Establish the group. Assign roles and responsibilities to the group members and establish each member’s strengths and weaknesses.
• Envision: as a group you have to visualise the outcome and goals, and examine the problem.
• Engineer: design a plan to achieve your goal.
• Execute: bring your plans to life and manage the process as a group.
• Examine: look at the product and find out what needs improvement.

For example: You and five other classmates have to get together to complete a group task. You would first break down the task into separate parts and assign those parts to the group members that are best fit for it. Then you would bring all your efforts together and formulate your product. At the end you would look at your completed task and improve on anything that needs improvement and do those improvements as a group before the due date.

 

During the current Covid-19 pandemic it is more difficult for you to complete tasks as a group now than before the pandemic started. However, technology has evolved and has allowed us to have live online chat rooms on zoom platforms or even chat on WhatsApp groups.

Conclusion

Digital fluency is the ability to make to most of tools available to you in the digital world and to be able to innovate and create something new with these tools. Being digitally fluent allows you to develop new skills everyday that you can use to for your own self-development. Just like how the ability to read and write allows you to broaden your vocabulary and enables you to articulate concepts accurately and more effective than others, digital fluency allows you to master technology with the use of complex problem-solving and critical thinking skills to solve new problems you may face in the future.

References

Medium. 2018.Cognitive computing and artificial intelligence, 2 August 2018. [Online]. Available at: https://medium.com/@stangarfield/cognitive-computing-and-artificial-intelligence-97a8e17fc5cd [Accessed 26 June 2020]

Medium . 2018. Technology and literacy in the 21^st century, 26 September 2018. [Online]. Available at: https://medium.com/literate-schools/technology-and-literacy-in-the-21st-century-1c0ee74a20b4

Megapixl. 2020. Illustration: 3D Laptop, magnifying glass and computer files, 4 May 2020. [Online]. Available at: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LXjsB9KogyAJ:https://www.megapixl.com/3d-laptop-magnifying-glass-and-computer-files-illustration-47862467+&cd=29&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=za [Accessed 26 June 2020]

Centage. 2020. Art and science of business decision making, 21 July 2020. [Online]. Available at: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:fKj2KlTNdo8J:https://www.centage.com/the-art-and-science-of-business-decision-making/+&cd=31&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=za [Accessed 26 June 2020]

Best sample resume. 2015. Moving from part-time to full time, 10 April 2015. [Online]. Available at:

https://www.bestsampleresume.com/advice/moving-from-part-time-to-full-time-work/ [Accessed 26 June 2020]

ID 360. 2013. Build your social media networking presence, 15 January 2013. [Online]. Available at: https://id360inc.com/building-your-social-media-networking-presence/ [Accessed 26 June 2020]

New Common. 1^st-3^rd industrial revolution, 28 January 2020. [Online]. Available at: https://www.newcomen.com/activity/presidential-address-from-the-first-to-the-third-industrial-revolution/ [Accessed 26  June 2020]

League. Changes in the American high school to promote college readiness, January 2016. [Online]. Available at: https://www.league.org/innovation-showcase/changes-american-high-school-promote-college-readiness-increase-degree [Accessed 26 June 2020]

Start up talky. How to tackle virtual team management challenges, 6 July 2020. [Online]. Available at: https://startuptalky.com/virtual-team-management-challenges/ [Accessed 26 June 2020]

Core Education. 2015. What is digital fluency, 23 September 2015. [Online]. Available at: http://blog.core-ed.org/blog/2015/10/what-is-digital-fluency.html [Accessed 26 June 2020]

All Things Learning. 2012. Getting fluent with the five fluencies, 14 march 2012. [Online]. Available at: https://allthingslearning.wordpress.com/tag/creativity-fluency/ [Accessed 26 June 2020]

The IIE. 2015. Digital citizenship [Module Manule]. Unpublished.