Effective Communication and Collaboration

Effective communication is another component of digital literacy and can be made with the digital skills of email, social media, text messaging, effective presentations and videoing facilities. Effective communication is when a person communicates to another person efficiently, clearly and regularly. In education communication takes place from teacher to student, student to student, teacher to parent, parent to student and parent to parent.

‘not only how you convey a message so that it is received and understood by  someone in exactly the way you intended, it’s also how you listen to gain the full meaning of what’s being said and to make the other person feel heard and understood’. (Robinson et al. 2015)

The skills which are associated with this component can be email which allows for teachers to communicate with students in university. I use student email to find out about assignments, to tell lecturers if I am ill and to ask questions. I find this an effective method of communication as it is quick and can be accessed anywhere which allows for no time delay. The skill is easily gained and is available to anyone. Another skill I have gained is blogging. I was new to blogging till I created this one, it was easy to do and the website guides you. There are many websites which can be used such as Blogger.com where you use your Gmail account to set it up.

Effective Communication can also interlink with the component Collaboration. Collaboration in education involves group work, debate and sharing of ideas to expand on each other’s view. Digital skills which can be used are digital mind maps where one student can make a mind map and another student can go online and further develop it. Websites which offer this are known as Wiki’s. Some websites which can be used are Coggle a website using your google account which saves the mind map and Bubbl.us which is a skill I have gained on my course which involved class participation which we could then all access through a student portal. PowerPoints again can be used to create a debate and group work.

The two components create a digitally competent learner by using technology to mediate communication & collaboration, learning about & with digital technologies. This is the case for most of the components; also they gain a balanced attitude towards technology as they will be able to see the benefits it yields when doing group working.

Over all technology plays an important role not just in education but in society. Therefore most of us can be classed as a digitally competent individual and a digitally competent learner. Philibin (2014, P6) stated

‘We all need basic digital skills to participate in everyday life as a digital citizen, whether it is to communicate or find information. Almost everyone needs to be able to use the internet, process simple word documents and find information online. Lack of such skills can lead to exclusion from society as well as the job market.’

 

Reference:

Bubbl.us (n.d) [Online] Available at: https://bubbl.us/ [Accessed: 7th December 2015]

Coggle (n.d) [Online] Available at: https://coggle.it/ [Accessed: 7th December 2015]

Philibin, M.(2014) ‘Digital skills for tomorrow’s world’ [PDF] [Online] Available at: https://policy.bcs.org/sites/policy.bcs.org/files/Interim%20report.pdf [Accessed: 7th Decemeber 2015]

Robinson, L. et al (2015) ‘Effective Communication’ [Online] http://www.helpguide.org/articles/relationships/effective-communication.htm [Accessed: 7th December 2015]