 I hope you can hear me for another very interesting event with our dear friend Alita Derisinga from Leicester University. They were going to have this webinar on a five-vote topic that is the use of digital by university students and we are all very much interested in the subject and everyone involved, directly involved in it. I just want to make a brief introduction about our Eden app, Network of Academics and Professional with supporting, of course, in the framework of Eden, the possibility to offer to our membership this kind of webinar with so many interesting and relevant contributions by our colleagues that are so kind to offer their work to the community. And what I wanted to tell you, regarding of course the fact that you can be part of this community taking part of what the Eden Network of Academics and Professional offers, supporting networking, supporting the possibility to meet other colleagues and start new researches together. The Network of Academics and Professional is coordinated by a steering committee that I chair. We try to give a different kind of support, we help members building up a personal portfolio, we promote communication as you know through this kind of events like the webinars but also Eden chat of course are part of our offer. Here you can see a picture where all the members of the next steering committee are shown so you can match faces to the various names that I think you already know. The members area where I recommend you to enter and log in to meet other colleagues who are part of the community. Here you have a list of opportunities that membership includes. Do not forget that being a corporate member allow you to delegate up to 30 individuals in the NAP, in the Network of Academics and Professional. So there's the possibility to have a conference to participate in conferences that reduce fees. And the most important thing is what I consider really the added value of being part of this network is the possibility to meet with other colleagues to exchange ideas about what we do in our institutions. The use of social media, the use of channels of communication is central in our activity. And so please have a look at our program. But first of all do not miss the possibility to meet face to face this time at our annual conference that will take place in Bruges in June from the 15th to the 19th of June. There we will have the opportunity to have a speed date meeting organized by our Network of Academics and Professionals where the idea is again to have the opportunity to exchange our views but especially our research interest in order to start new projects together. So I don't want to steal more time to Valita and I really am really looking forward to hearing what he is going to tell us about digital literacy for university students. I recommend the audience to ask questions, participate, interact with Valita. I really thank you all and Valita please the floor is yours. Okay. Hi everyone. Good afternoon. My name is Palita and I am from University of Leicester. Thank you very much Antonella and the whole of colleagues from Eden for giving me the opportunity to talk about the research that we are doing. So this is really a great opportunity to share some of the findings from our research but also a great opportunity to hear from you as well from your perspective. As you have seen from the title slide you can see that the title is slightly different from what has been advertised. So this is really to kind of give a better focus on what we are doing here at Leicester University. As Antonella mentioned it will be good if you type your questions as we go along so I can try to take some of those as we go along and then make the session a little bit more interactive as well. About myself, I work in Leicester University School of Education. I lead two master's programs. One is international education, distance learning program and also learning technologies, distance learning program as well. And I also teach on campus based program international education and where we have the majority of the students are coming from other countries other than the UK. In fact there are some years when we don't have any students from UK. This year we have only one student from UK and Waheda in the group is that particular person. So this is one of the reasons why we were interested in carrying out this research project looking at digital literacy skills from a more international perspective. And in the presentation what I am going to talk to you about is the kind of data that we have collected from students from China. I will talk to you a little bit more why particularly students from China. So these are my research collaborators Dr. Tracy Simmons from Department of Media Communication and Sociology with whom I have been working on this project for about six or seven years. And Dr. Mingji Jiang also work in the School of Education and also contributed to this activity as well. And some of the slides I am going to show you are from her PhD thesis. So in terms of our initial aims we started the project with an idea of looking at to investigate international students access to and the use of the kind of digital technologies they use and what you might call Web 2 technologies as well. And we wanted to look at how they use these technologies for their both formal and informal learning at the university but within the context of academic learning. And also our master's programs are just one year long, just 12 months. So we wanted to see how they develop their digital literacy skills during that particular one year period. So as you can probably imagine one year is a very short period of time in terms of academic studies. So and also one of the reasons another let me go back to the previous slide and another motivation more like from a personal point of view was that when we began to teach when we teach on the program for about three years ago from here from previous ago we began to notice that students are using very strange applications websites and in very strange languages as well. So interface is tend to be in their own language Chinese Arabic Russian and you can name many different languages. So when we teach you teach in English and you have the PowerPoint slides in English but when you see students computers they have something completely different. So we wanted to know what's going on and why are they using these kind of tools and for what purpose as well. And so this is where I would like you to think about your familiarity or involvement with research projects on students digital literacy skills. This can be from any level of education schools or universities or informal education. So if you are involved in any kind of project if you know a really good projects that we should follow up please type up the on in the chat box. So as we as we as we as we continue with the presentation and then as I said earlier if you have any questions please type them as well. So it's useful to start with some definitions of what we mean by digital literacy skills. Here again if you are familiar with any definitions or any any people or those who are who have come up with really interesting insight through definitions of digital literacy skills or digital literacy or the sources that we should look for definitions please type them up as well. What I'm going to show you in next few slides are few definitions that I have looked at and some of the challenges with these definitions as well. So to start with this is one of my favorite definitions of digital literacy skills. This is by somebody called Paul Gilster and in a book he published with the same name same title in 1997. He talked about I think I mean some people say that he's one of the early authors who began to think about digital literacy skills as a specific area of study or investigation. So what he meant how he said was digital literacy skills or digital literacy means mastering ideas not keystrokes. So what he meant by that is that it is not really the technical skills that we should be looking at. It's really the ideas behind those keystrokes and I think that's quite a useful quite a simple definition to make a start with. So another person that I really I have read quite a lot and I have taken inspirations from was somebody called Buckingham from from UK. And again this is slightly an early publication in 2006 but it might be worth looking at what he's been writing since then. So what he says about digital literacy skills is that digital literacy skills is much more than a functional matter of learning how to use a computer and keyboard. Again it's quite similar to the division that we have seen earlier. It's about really ideas. It's not really about not necessarily about the technical skills and so on. And then he goes on to compare the skills that are needed in a digital stage age with that in a print age. What he says with as with print we need to be able to evaluate and use information critically. So we do that with print anyway. So with online material we ought to be doing that as well. And also we ought to be able to ask questions about the sources of that information and interest of its producers and the way in which it represents the world. So in a world where we have lots of things like fake news and some people using the Internet to produce misinformation this is quite an important thing to think about. And also not only in general media but this can happen in academic world as well. So I think that the difference here is that in an online environment it's quite easy to produce this kind of material whereas in print media you have several people to evaluate your work, peer review and so on. But in an online environment the authenticity can be questionable quite often. When we started our research project we came up with some of the conceptual issues or some of the challenges in terms of researching digital literacy skills. I have highlighted here three of those challenges. One challenge is there seems to be a link between digital literacy skills and academic literacy skills. What I mean by this link is that we often find students having issues of writing. So that is an academic literacy skills but that is also connected to digital literacy skills as well. So when you are looking at a particular issue sometimes it is quite difficult to differentiate between whether it's something to do with academic literacy skills or digital literacy skills. A second challenge is the different terminologies that you come across in the literature. So I have just pointed out just four of them and I'm sure you have come across notions like information literacy, media literacy, computer literacy and digital literacy and then there are many others as well. So my colleague who works in the Department of Media and Communication in their kind of journals and the literature they quite often tend to use the notion of media literacy. But if you are speaking to somebody from a library they quite often tend to use the idea of information literacy which is quite a much older term or the notion or an idea than digital literacy. Then we have the computer literacy and the notion we are discussing today, digital literacy. And then a third challenge that we have faced was that when you are looking at various definitions and frameworks and tools and that kind of things on digital literacy or digital literacy skills. There are some of those definitions and frameworks that are quite simple and that are quite focusing on academic learning. But then there are other definitions and frameworks that almost cover everything in our life, almost things to do with lifelong learning. So that is one of the challenges but we wanted to focus on digital literacy skills in the context of academic learning. And in the next two or three slides I'm going to just show you links to different digital literacy skills models or frameworks. We won't be going into details of those today but once you have had access to the recording, if you check these links you can follow up on those. So in the UK one of the organization that has been working for a very long time on digital literacy skills is JISC. I'm sure quite a lot of you are familiar with JISC. Its long name is Joint Information Systems Committee that has been providing funding to carry out research on digital literacy skills. In fact, the University of Leicester has just started to use one of their digital literacy frameworks to evaluate students and staff's digital literacy skills development. So as you can see there is there digital way of looking at digital literacy skills quite broad. There are seven elements to the model. That is this is another framework that I have found on the web. This is a compilation of different digital literacy frameworks. And the third one is this is digital literacy policy in national context. This is from Canada. So you might be interested to have a look at this document as well in terms of how they interpret digital literacy skills in a more national context. So as I was saying the point I'm trying to make is that the definition of digital literacy skills as a very simple idea which is mastering ideas not keystrokes. That idea has grown into something much much bigger. So I think as researchers I think we kind of need to think about how we might research digital literacy skills. One of the ones as I said I really like is Buckingham's way of talking about digital literacy skills. It's old but I think it works. He identifies four dimensions of digital literacy skills representation language production and audience. So here he talks about criticality and authority of the information and who produce the information and the grammar of producing information. This is where some of the technical skills are coming into play and the production and the audience. And who we are in terms of the consumer of digital information. So at the end of these slides there is a list of references so it might be worth following up on those as well. And so this is the framework we have used in our research in terms of trying to get students to talk about their digital literacy skills. And now focusing on China, focusing on Chinese students. This is as I said mainly partly because the majority of students on our courses are coming from mainland China. UK universities rely quite a lot on Chinese students, students coming from China. So one of the reasons, academic reasons for focusing on international students is that what we found when we look at previous research is that there is a limited focus on the diversity of student population in universities. Especially trying to collect data from students coming from into other countries to UK. And also students on postgraduate courses as well. And also students who are trying to develop their digital literacy skills within a one year period, which is a very short period of time. Just the context of behind our research. Yeah, I've got five points here. Why it is important focus on this particular group. Their contribution to UK economy is very high. And their numbers are quite high as well. And the majority of postgraduate students are from China. And then they will continue to be the largest source of income for international postgraduate in the years to come as well. And also more locally, when you think about a university like Leicester, not only Leicester, we have another university in our town. And also universities in our region and quite a few well in the UK overall. But the major, a lot of students are coming from China for those courses. So it's an important group to focus on. The very first year when we started to collect data, first couple of years, we used a questionnaire to collect data from students. And then we use focus groups, the middle one, that means group interviews, three or four students in each group. But only two or four focus groups a year. And then we did the focus group workshop with students as well, more like a one day workshop, trying to get students to show us what they can do with digital skills. But later on we dropped the questionnaire and we dropped the focus groups. We continued to collect data using focus groups. Just give me a second. So what we did in the focus group interviews was that we have asked the students to tell us the scenarios of how they go about doing a piece of assessment, like an essay, and then how they use digital resources and then how they are going to evaluate the authenticity of information. So that is more like the first question. And then we had some probing questions as well. So this is the general question template that we have used. So we have asked them to think about a particular learning and study related activity. The easiest one for them to think about was a piece of assessment. And we asked them how they do it, where they make a start and what kind of resources they use. And then they will begin to talk about the digital technologies resources they have used. Then we began to ask more and more questions. But later on I will show you the shift of the focus later on. So you will have access to this. I'm not going to show you this, keep this on the screen anymore. But you got the general idea. So we asked them to tell us about how they are going to do, how they are doing a particular piece of assessment and the use of technology. But after two or three years and our shift, our focus shifted a little bit. Because we thought that unless we asked them to tell us a little bit about their previous academic background and also the issues that they face in things like writing academic essays, it doesn't really give us much data or incomplete picture. So we were more or less looking at academic literacy skills as well. So this is where I mentioned earlier that there is a link more or less between the academic literacy skills and digital literacy skills. And then we also asked them questions about the transition issues and the culture. Because we were interested, they began to tell us about how different it is learning in the UK compared with China. And the kind of issues that they are facing as a student in the UK. So that's when we began to think about the cultural issues as well. And also bearing in mind that the majority of these students, almost 900% of these, this is a particular kind of generation where they are the only child in their family. So that is that particular aspect as well in terms of adjusting to studies in the UK. So research aims, more recent, these are the kind of research aims. So we were looking at the last one is the digital literacy skills. But we also were looking at transition from learning from one cultural set into learning in another and how the culture influences learning. So we were looking at culturally sensitive pedagogies. And then we were interested or we were aware that they were coming from a more what you might call confusion values oriented culture. The way they were grown up and in the in their universities, how they learned and in families, how they grew up as well. And then how the digital resources help them to help their transition process within one year. As you can see, it's kind of became slightly expanded. So some of the concept that we have struggled into understand and try to use to explain our data were confusion heritage of learning. So this is a major influence in teaching and learning in East Asian countries, not only in China, but also Japan and Korea and Taiwan, Hong Kong and most of those countries. But there are misconceptions about this particular way of learning as well. For example, there is a misconception that the students coming from those countries just focus on memorizing but that is not really the case. So these are our results. So the basic idea was that we wanted to we wanted not to forget that we need to look into their culture as well. So very short extract from a transcript. So they were talking about the difference between how they learn or the learning arrangement or the classroom environment when they were doing their undergraduate degree. So this is very much a difficult situation for them to adjust when students come to UK to study. So this is where quite a lot of the time they find the technologies being useful. So we found in classrooms, students are using a lot of mobile phones, a lot of apps. I'm sure they are doing various personal things as well, but they tend to be doing quite useful things as well in order to be able to engage in their learning. And then the second extract here focuses on the sort of assignments they have to do. They need to write 4,000 word essays, four of those and another long dissertation, 20,000 words. So by the end of the year, they have to be they're writing quite a lot in English. And that's the first time they do that as well. And then there is a focus on understanding, which is probably different from what they've been doing before. So this is where we thought that there are a lot of transition issues in terms of getting used to the new learning culture. And they try to deploy a lot of different kind of technologies and we have seen apps for almost everything. And then this extract shows talks about in this extract, they were talking about the discussions that they need to be engaged in. Initially, they find it quite hard, but later on they get used to it. So this is a bullet slide showing the differences between the two contexts. So there is a difference between the types of teaching and learning sessions and types of assignments, academic writing conventions and the particular behavior in teaching sessions. All of those most of these are quite new to this particular group of students. So here again, this student is talking about the teachers are guiding students rather than actually teaching much. So that's a different way of learning. So this is where some of those technologies can become quite useful for students. So I'm going to skip some of these slides because you will have access to them later on. I'm a little bit conscious about the time. So I hope you can see this. So this is the kind of technologies students were using web tools and applications that we found they are using for their formal learning. So if you have a mobile phone, sorry, I'm sure you have and take a photograph of this slide because I would like you to compare this with a slide. I'm going to show you later on. I should have put this two slides and side by side. But if you take a photograph of this, then you can compare it with something I'm going to show you later on. So this is the kind of things on the left hand side. I think yes, on your screen on the left hand side, the web tools and applications students were using in China. And then on the right are the kind of web tools and applications they use in the UK. So you can see that in the China, no Google, well, no Blackboard and no Wikipedia. So these are all black band in China. Well, Blackboard is accessible if the universities use them. But there are several applications that are not accessible in China. So when these students begin to use them, it's a kind of a different kind of transition. But you can also see that they continue to use some of these applications in the UK as well for their formal learning to help them their transition. And then this next slide shows the tools that students use for communication in China. The major one is WeChat. I'm just wondering whether you are familiar with an application and tool called WeChat. Well, if you have any students in China, from China, and then if you are working with someone in China, then without WeChat, you won't be able to get much further. So our students use WeChat, so we have to use WeChat as well. So it's a major communication tool and it's a major tool that they use in China to pay for goods and services and almost everything. So it is one of the examples of a web tool that shows the Chinese cultural values. Okay, so you can see they begin to use Facebook, they begin to some of the use things like WhatsApp and Line and Twitter and Skype, but that is after they come to UK. So the next one, so this is the online resources and tools that students use for their academic learning. And if you can compare this with the other image I showed you where I have asked you to take a photograph. So you can see that it's a completely mirror image of what you have seen before. So things like YouTube are not available in China, but instead they have something called Youku, which you can see in the photograph you have taken. And same with others as well. So instead of Wikipedia, they would have something else instead of, I don't know, Twitter, they have something else and so on. So there is a big transition students to move from when they come to come to UK in terms of studies. So when we, if we put learning material on YouTube, on Twitter and on other sites, then they will have a difficulty. And for most of them, it will be the first time to hear about these tools. Okay. So students in these slides talk about the different kind of resources they use in China as well. A lot of the things are quite centralized. And for this particular site CNKI is a centralized national knowledge infrastructure portal where you can access the scientific articles. It's a very centralized and controlled centrally. That's another thing about material and resources in China that they have used to gain access to. Some of the preliminary conclusions from a study were that, so they show us a huge area of online resources. And then they bring those tools and resources and experiences with them when they come to study in the UK. So the implication is that I think as academics we need to be aware of these. And they are not, it is not that they don't get used to the tools and resources available in the UK. So they talk about things like TED Talk and other resources. So they also get used to the resources that they have, but they need a little bit of time. So this is the third point is an important one. Whenever they face limitations in resources, they draw on sources from China. Book reviews, sites, translation tools and so on. So there are certain apps they use in classrooms to translate words. So you just point the mobile phone into a word and then it will translate. And then there are some tools that translates whole PDF files into Chinese. And the translation is quite accurate as well. Yes, so they do face some issues in transition and this is partly the cultural issues as well. And then things to do with academic, new academic working context, writing essays, acknowledging sources, referencing. This is where the academic writing skills issue comes into the foreground. And then I think it is important to be aware, acknowledge the cultural issues as well. And then how we might help their transition smoothly into the more western type of teaching and learning context. But we also need to be a little bit aware of how we use these terms. There can be misinterpretations as well. So I'm going to show you this particular idea called cultural script. So this is a useful notion to look at the transition issues and how students begin to use new digital resources and tools. What it means is that the students, whoever, any person who grows up in a particular culture, bring some of the cultural elements into their work, their new life. But they also tend to adopt to the new situation as well. So if anyone is interested in the idea of cultural script, these particular authors are quite useful to read. So for us, for universities, we should be more aware of the kind of digital tools and resources students are familiar with. And then to work with those tools and resources and then to help their formal learning, informal learning. And we need to acknowledge those as well. And then we need to be aware of how we might provide support in terms of students developing digital literacy skills. So I don't think it's really a useful thing to develop our frameworks just based on our own conceptions and what we use in the west. We need to look at what kind of tools students are bringing with them from their own cultures as well. So this is a list of selected references. So the top one, Francis 2010, this is actually a book based on a PhD thesis submitted to University of Oxford. That's one of the early studies that looked into students use of digital tools and resources in formal learning in university context. So that's really a useful book to look at. And then the other one will be the last one to look at the cultural script. I think that, yes, okay. So we are in future. So we collect data almost every year. Our plan is to conduct individual interviews with the same student during the course of their postgraduate study period. And also we are thinking about using other data collection methods as well. We did do a large scale survey, but we didn't continue to do that. But I think we have enough data to develop a survey tool to collect data from large cohort of students. And for that we are interested in working with more partners, more colleagues. So at the moment we are just beginning to work with colleagues from University of Sheffield and Liverpool, and Joan Morse University as well. So if you're interested, please drop me a line. And I think my email address is at the beginning of the presentation. So thank you very much for taking part. Okay, so yeah, so let's take some questions. So Francesca, thank you very much for the question. I'll take from Francesca's question. So the question is do we need to adopt different educational approaches to develop students' digital literacy from different cultural background? Yes, I think so. I mean it might not be completely different educational approaches, but I think we need to perhaps do something like an audit of the type of digital tools and skills students bring in. And then we can probably adopt our way of helping them to learn digital literacy skills. Bearing in mind that especially students from China for example, when they go back they won't have access to Facebook. If you are a Facebook friend of a Chinese student and if you still just keep Facebook, you will never hear from them again. So we need to think about the kind of tools they use as well. In fact, I'm sure Wahida will agree with me. I'm sure our students on her course, the first thing they do is they get you to open a WeChat account. And then everyone is happy. Maria Rosarsia, thank you very much, Maria. Thank you very much for all your help before as well. And the question is what do you think about the connection between critical thinking development and digital literacy? I think they are very much connected. There is a strong connection between critical thinking development and digital literacy because digital literacy skills is a critical, has quite a strong critical component as well. So that's where the idea of mastering ideas comes before the mastering technical skills. So there is a strong connection between the two. Thank you very much for the question, Maria. Yes, okay. So if I can take a few more questions. Wahid, I don't know any other questions from colleagues. I could have shown you a little bit more because unfortunately, I just moved to a new office. So my books and everything is everywhere at the moment. So the only bit of the office that is tidy is what you can see at the back. If I turn my camera around, you will see an untidy office where I can't find any books at the moment, any of my books. And another thing I just wanted to mention was that some of the methodological changes we did was initially our idea was to, in the early stages, our focus groups were quite big. We had about five or six students in a focus group. But what we found was that that was not very useful to collect data because when you have five or six students, this particular cultural group means that there is always one or two students who will be quite silent if you like. So now our focus groups are quite small, either two or three. But now I think an even better approach will be to collect data from just a single one student so we can get them to talk. And another thing we have done based on our research was that we have changed our approach to doing the initial induction period. And now we have a different way of providing an induction to students where students try to share their experience of learning as undergraduates with everybody and giving more time to socialize with other students in order for, especially for the majority of participants to be able to share, be familiar with sharing ideas. Okay, so I think it looks like we... Okay, sorry, Munali. So your question was the cultural script concept and missed the reference I put up. So let me take the presentation back. So the main reference I recommend you to read. This is actually, you can download from the internet. It's available as a free book. The last one in this list. It's a long name, bellicolor, T and Watkins C2008, improving intercultural learning experiences in high education, responding to cultural scripts for learning. In fact, what they have done in their research, these two authors are from University of London in the UK. So they have actually interviewed students from many different international backgrounds. So not only China, but students from India and other countries, Middle East countries and so on. So it's really a useful book to download and read. Yeah, so the idea of cultural script is that we, the way we do things, we behave, we talk, our behavior is based on the culture in which we grew up. So we always bring that kind of script with us whenever we go into a new cultural context. But it doesn't mean that we are not fixed and we can change as well. But initially I think it's important to understand why people do things in a different way. So we can understand each other better. So we have now 27 minutes past four in the afternoon in your time. So I think the plan was to do this webinar for one hour. So perhaps we can stop here and thank you very much for your active participation. And I really enjoyed talking to you about this. And thank you very much again, Antonella and all the colleagues in the Eden secret retreat. Thank you very much. So I hope to meet you at something similar. Okay, so we have the next Eden. Okay, thank you very much. I'm going to switch off my microphone and the webcam. Good to see you. Thank you. Good afternoon.