A critical focus on digital literacies

Developing students’ digital literacies for living and working in 21st century is a global issue (Lee 2014). In the UK there have been calls for a greater focus on digital literacy in higher education from the QAA (2014), NUS (n.d.) and House of Lords (2015) driven, in part, by changes to graduate employment brought about by globalisation (Beetham 2015). Digital literacies are clearly a topical issue within UK HEIs, however these reports tend to focus on strategic and operational issues, and to offer little in relation to critical debate. This symposium address this gap by exploring institutional responses to notions of digital literacy in a rigorous and critical way. It consists of 6 papers each of which takes a different aspect of the topic: