Mobile Digital Literacy of Australian Adolescent Students

Introduction

The presence of mobile digital technologies in the lives of contemporary students is evident everywhere we look. School students today will have a life-long exposure to portable digital technologies that are equipped with evolving features and increasingly advanced functionalities on ever-simpler interfaces. These devices enable students to access and have more choices in relation to the vast amount of information, digital resources (apps) and services online than at any previous point in human history (Hobbs, 2010). Research has shown that adolescent students often own more than one mobile device that they use on a daily basis (Ng & Nicholas, 2018; Britain, 2013; Raco, 2014) and that their lives are increasingly immersed in digital experiences that are mediated via smart mobile devices (Ng & Nicholas, 2018). The challenge for educators is not whether smart mobile technology should be used but how to use such technology to support students to achieve both individually (Dahlstrom & Bichsel, 2014) and in collaboration with others. To achieve this goal, developing appropriate understandings of mobile digital literacy is both challenging and urgent.

The ubiquitous nature of mobile technology combined with a plethora of applications (apps) and increasingly easy access to the Internet means that students could be potentially online and connected all the time, undertaking activities such as networking through their social media sites and online communities of interest; finding required information as it is needed; consuming information in various formats and modalities; collaborating, creating, sharing and distributing material online; as well as being entertained and/or educated through media such as music, videos, movies, TV programs, online newspapers/magazines and virtual books. These students’ frequent presence online brings challenges in terms of both learning and safety. Adolescents’ ability to search online for relevant information or resources, assess the accuracy and reliability of the materials, and synthesize new content from them in an ethical manner influences how effectively they present themselves and learn. Studies have found that students with a combination of web-search proficiency and high content knowledge were able to select more relevant information and spend more time on evaluating the trustworthiness of the materials (Brand-Gruwel, Wopereis, & Vermetten, 2005; Lazonder, 2000). Teaching students to develop web-search skills as well as proficiency in critiquing and assessing the underlying meanings associated with texts, images, sounds and combinations of these is an important part of developing adolescents’ digital literacy. The students will need multi-literacy skills to be able to critically evaluate the complex layers in multimodal content that is characteristic of the digital media resources that young people embrace.

Millions of young people ‘meet’ online every day to chat, exchange ideas and share personal news and other information via rich and varied social networks. Apart from socialising, the Web 2.0 virtual space has become a lifestyle environment for young people where they are able to access services such as buying/selling and banking, being entertained e.g., downloading games, videos and music as well as posting creative artefacts such as photos, videos and applications. The evolution to Web 3.0 where machines understand and catalogue data in a manner similar to humans is accompanied by concerns about the unauthorised access and manipulation of data as well as autonomous initiation of actions (Bruwer, Jacobus & Rudman, 2015). As young people spend more time online, cybersafety issues and other potential risks increase (Hanewald, 2008). The risks include being bullied, stalked and exposed to identity fraud and inappropriate materials. A digitally literate individual would understand about, among other things, privacy, security and cybersafety. In other words, such individuals would be comfortable with the complexity of the digital world and be empowered to better manage online risks while growing their online presence in safe and creative ways. Capturing this complex and interwoven set of capabilities is a challenge.