Socio-Emotional Literacy within Digital Literacy Alongside Information Literacy, Eshet-Alkalai. (2004) highlights a kind of Socio-Emotional literacy needed to navigate the Internet, raising questions such as, “How do I know if another user in a chatroom is who he says he is?” or “How do I know if a call for blood donations on the Internet is real or a hoax?” Such questions should make us realize that there are no hard and fast rules for determining the answers. Instead, there is a necessary familiarity with the unwritten rules of Cyberspace; an understanding that while the Internet is a global village of sorts, it is also a global jungle of human communication, embracing everything from truth to falsehoods, honesty and deceit, and ultimately, good and evil. According Eshet-Alkalai (2004), This Socio-Emotional literacy requires users to be “very critical, analytical, and mature”— implying a kind of richness of experience that the literate transfers from real life to their dealings online. Curiously, while research shows that the older a user is, the less likely they are to behave naively online, this does not exempt them from the occasional lapse; They might not believe that a Nigerian prince is bequeathing 100 million dollars in gold bullion to them in exchange for their bank details, but they might be willing to believe that someone really is giving away 1000 units of the latest smartphone in exchange for their contact information. Digitally literate users know how to avoid the “traps” of cyberspace mainly because they are familiar with the social and emotional patterns of working in cyberspace—that it is really just an outworking of human nature. Digital Natives The term digital native has become something of a buzzword in the education sector over the past decade. This was popularized by Prensky (2001) in reference to the generation that was born during the information age (as opposed to digital immigrants—the generation prior that acquired familiarity with digital systems only as adults) and who has not known a world without computers, the Internet, and connectivity. Despite the fact that Prensky's original paper was not an academic one and had no empirical evidence to support its claims, educators and parents alike latched onto the term, spawning a school of thought wherein the decline of modern education is explained by educators’ lack of understanding of how digital natives learn and make decisions. However, a popular misconception borne out of the term digital natives and the educational ideas it spawned is that the generation in question is born digitally literate. If this is the case, then the question, "How can digital immigrants teach digital natives a literacy they already have?" is a valid one, to which the answer would be, correctly, "they cannot.” But the problem here is that "digitally literate” is popularly defined as the ability to use computers or use the Internet, which as we have seen earlier, 68
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Building and Enhancing New Literacies Across the Curriculum
