Exploring digital literacy in the era of digital civilization: A framework for college students in China

Cultivating the digital literacy of all citizens, especially for college students, would contribute to the construction of a ‘Learning Society’ where everybody loves learning and would offer a powerful impetus for building a modern country. First, this paper reviews the origins and general definitions of computer literacy, network literacy, media literacy, information literacy and digital literacy. Compared with similar terminologies, digital literacy features the subjective initiatives to actively improve one’s and others’ skills, competence, awareness and thinking mode for adapting to, qualifying for and creating a new digital age and society. Second, the internal logic in the Digital Literacy Framework of College Students (DLFCS) can be summarized as ‘Skills-Competencies-Awareness’ attributing to the evolution progress of ‘digital technologies utilization, actual problems solving, and digital awareness cultivation’. Following this logic, this paper develops the DLFCS through scene-based requirements analysis and professional consultations, including three areas (i.e. operational skills, applied competencies, thinking & awareness), identifying fifteen descriptors and their examples with key performances. Third, it measures the self-perception and actual performance of college students digital literacy by questionnaire, Q&A tests and task evaluation, and validates the completeness and validity of the DLFCS by Pearson correlation analysis of datasets collected in three modes. The results indicate that (a) the fifteen descriptors in DLFCS basically cover the essential areas of digital literacy with extremely weak correlations among them, (b) the relationships of progressive and intertwined ‘Skills-Competencies-Awareness’ demonstrate the validity of the internal logic and DLFCS itself, (c) to be digitally literate requires long-term and gradually-progressed cultivation and improvement, as achieving one descriptor of digital literacy proficiently does not guarantee good performance on the other descriptors.