Digital knowledge society

Literacy is a foundation of the knowledge society. Knowledge society, by Padilla-Meléndez and Garrido-Moreno is a society where the main of the prosperity and well-being of its people came from the creation, sharing, and use of knowledge (2008). Therefore, digital knowledge society is the process of creation, sharing, and use of knowledge by the people through digital means to aim prosperity and well-being.

Multiliteracies

In the information age, literacy is created and disseminated through a growing number of media. Then came the term multiliteracies. Multiliteracies is the ability to identify, interpret, create, and communicate meaning across a variety of visual, oral, corporal, musical, and alphabetical forms of communication (Müller, et al, 2009). ‘Multiliteracies’—a word we chose because it describes two important arguments we might have with the emerging cultural, institutional, and global order. The first argument engages with the multiplicity of communications channels and media; the second with the increasing salience of cultural and linguistic diversity (Cope and Kalantzis, 2001). “Today’s learners need to be able to use digital media to juxtapose and link text, diagram, table, dataset, video documentation, audio recording, and other media. Across all subject areas, meaning-making and knowledge representations are supported and enhanced today by digital production skills and technologies” (Cope, et al. 2019).

Multiliteracies’ design elements in the meaning-making process:

1. Linguistic Meaning,

2. Visual Meaning,

3. Audio Meaning,

4. Gestural Meaning,

5. Spatial Meaning,

6. Multimodal patterns of meaning that relate the first five modes of meaning to each other,

7. Then later, also Cope and Kalantzis, added Tactile Meaning (2012).

Seven design elements that are intended so that students do not limit literacy to just reading but absorb knowledge with many senses and interpret the meaning by various media. Multiliteracy is important to emphasize in today's learning methods because the development of technology should not make humans spoiled and consumptive but to become responsive, resourceful and able to create meaning from various sources available in the cloud such as e-book, online magazine, video, images, podcast, and data.

Data collection and interpretation

One of the developing technical skills is the ability to read and interpret data. The top 10 demanded jobs in 2020 according to the World Economic Forum are data-related jobs. Lately, many call it data literacy. Data literacy is defined as "The ability to read, write and communicate data in context, including an understanding of data sources and constructs, analytical methods and techniques applied - and the ability to describe the use case, application and resulting value" (Gartner, 2019).

Scheme of data collection and interpretation to form digital knowledge society

Scheme of data collection and interpretation to form digital knowledge society

Data collection

Data is basically any information. Digital technology enables people to access data in a variety of formats such as reading news, viewing pictures, listening to podcasts, observing gestures through videos, identifying behavior through images and videos, viewing movements through online maps, viewing population movements through online demographic maps, and specifically for tactile meaning, it is carried out through cognitive processes from textual and visual information, for example imagining the rough texture of natural stone by a description, including touching digital surfaces either with direct fingers or with the help of a mouse.

Access and collect data in the form of data per se

Even though the data is any information as elaborated as above, data is often presented in table form, both quantitative and qualitative. Some of them also are accompanied by visualizations for instance line charts, histograms, and pie charts.

Data interpretation

The data collected will be interpreted simultaneously or partially, completely depending on the needs and abilities of the user. The data is then used as the basis for decisions which are then executed and presented in various formats to be uploaded.

Practical example

Someone made a report about social media usage in a certain country, he used sources namely the World Economic Forum, Statista, YouTube, and TED Talks. He uploaded the report to an online magazine then resulted in web visits, likes, and shares captured by Google Analytics. Next, another person used metadata from Google Analytics to analyze the performance of the online magazine, which generates assumptions about visitor behavior.

Why data literacy?

Data literacy employs all meaning-making design elements. Data exhibits spatial meaning for units among the described context. By looking at the data, the user can say a unit is above or below another unit. This reading leads to a broader interpretation such as comparisons at the national, regional, and global levels and does not rule out the combination of meanings based on other data that are deemed relevant.

In the same report, the WE Forum also predicted the positions that continue to emerge are those near to the data, whereas contrary, the positions that will soon be redundant are the ones that can be replaced by a machine. From this, it can be assumed that data literacy through various technologies is one of the determining factors in professional life, not for the future, but start from now.

If the learner does not meet the intelligence like the artificial one, then the learner's skill is threatened to be replaced. "The rapid pace and widening scope of technological progress could lead to more job destruction than job creation, at least in the short and medium-term" (UNCTAD, 2018, p.21). 

We are data

Users' movement on the internet brings gestural and spatial meaning in the terms of digital. It is captured by the cookies and used by many jobs to test many assumptions and to execute many decisions. By teaching everything with a data literacy approach, teachers are creating the traceable, learnable movement for the sake of the advancement of digital knowledge society itself.

Ref:

• Graphic course: Author
• Padilla-Meléndez, Antonio and Aurora Garrido-Moreno. "Use of E-Collaboration Technologies Among Students of Management." Encyclopedia of E-Collaboration, edited by Ned Kock, IGI Global, 2008, pp. 667-672. http://doi:10.4018/978-1-59904-000-4.ch101
• Müller, Jörg,et al. "New Media Literacy and the Digital Divide." Handbook of Research on New Media Literacy at the K-12 Level: Issues and Challenges, edited by Leo Tan Wee Hin and R. Subramaniam, IGI Global, 2009, pp. 72-88. http://doi:10.4018/978-1-60566-120-9.ch005
• New London Group. "Multiliteracies. Literacy learning and the design of social futures." Language in Society, Volume 30, Issue 2, April 2001, edited by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, pp. 281 - 285. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404501262058
• Kalantzis, Mary & Cope, William. "The Teacher as Designer: Pedagogy in the New Media Age." E-Learning and Digital Media. 7. 200, 2010 10.2304/elea.2010.7.3.200
• WE Forum. "The Future of Jobs Report 2020.", https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-future-of-jobs-report-2020
• Gartner. "A Data and Analytics Leader's Guide to Data Literacy.", 2019. https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/a-data-and-analytics-leaders-guide-to-data-literacy/
• UNCTAD. "Technology and Innovation Report 2018.", 2018 https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/tir2018_en.pdf