Digital Literacy in Higher Education

The traditional notion of literacy is simply the skill of reading and writing. What this notion lacks is a sense of the complexity of skills associated with decoding and producing written texts, especially within the context of higher education and professional scholarship. One relatively limited expansion of the notion of literacy is that it should include not only textual media but also other modalities such as visual, aural, and interactive modalities (presumably many of which are digital). Richard Lanham’s use of the term digital literacy explicitly included technology-supported multimodal text in the concept of literacy. Later, the New London Group expanded this notion using the term multiliteracy to encompass a larger notion of literacy as participating in ever-widening means of communicating. In addition, the rise ...