Digital Smarts: Enhancing Learning & Teaching

Authors: Noeline Wright & Dianne Forbes (Eds) Endorsed by Professor Curtis J. Bonk

Published: July 2015

This publication is available free as an eBook or as a PDF (Please Note: the eBook should be opened with an eBook reader such as iBooks or an equivalent. Some internet browsers may require you to right click the link and 'save link as' to download).

Why 'Digital Smarts'?

We chose digital smarts as the key phrase for the book because we have appropriated it to encompass the following

• an emphasis on pedagogy
• agency, or students' active participation in their learning. This includes any learner in early childhood through to secondary and tertiary learning contexts where learners exercise agency over the focus of learning, generate content and resources, and are encouraged to provide feedback and feedforward to each other
• creativity
• risk-taking, experimentation, inquiry
• challenging the publishing status quo—managing our own workload, using open review processes, viewing assessment as learning, posing challenges for teachers and seeking open access to research publications.

We think it is important for digital technologies to be seen as the servants of learning, providing opportunities for all learners to be adaptive help-seekers and agents of their own lives as they appropriate these technologies as cultural tools.

Endorsement

Curtis J Bonk, an influential academic from Indiana University School of Education has this to say about the book:

Noeline Wright and Dianne Forbes do not simply provide us with "Digital Smarts;" instead, they offer us a way to view such smarts from the perspective of a first year teacher, librarian, researcher, student, evaluator, and many other perspectives. In the various chapters of this book, it is obvious that these technology-based smarts are useful from early childhood to the workplace and beyond. Clearly, the skills to effectively and innovatively utilize digital technology for learning today are not just needed when one enters a school, university, or library, but pervade life. Importantly, each chapter brings fresh insights into what these "smarts" entail as well as how to nurture and assess them, often from a neo-Vygotskian or culturally rich point of view. At the same time, this insightfully designed book also offers an assembly of research methodologies for better understanding and enhancing a wide array of 21^st century skills. What is perhaps most smart is that this book is actually free and open to download.