How to help others become digitally literate?

In my previous post I asked my readers how they help other’s understand the potential of new ways of working? How can we teach and show others what digital literacy is?

I wanted to share one idea I use to teach others to work out loud. What I always try to do is relate to the primary processes of the organization or, even better, to the primary work processes of the person I’m helping. He/she is working in a certain way and used to that. For instance, he uses email to send around documents and get feedback on them. Or he sends out an email to a group of people to get ideas about a certain topic. Starting there I ask that person what he/she likes about working that way. And what he/she dislikes about it. Then I ask how he/she thinks the dislikes could be solved. My experience is: most people don’t think they can be solved. They just cope with the issues and carry on. If this is the case, I show them how I do the same job with a certain tool. I tell them why I work in that way and why I like to work that way. And I stop there. In most cases they say: I didn’t know there were tools like that, could you help me get/use them as well? In some cases they continue to work they way the way. And that’s OK. I can’t force them to work in another way. I just hope they remember there is another way and try it some other time.

Digital Illiteracy

Some time ago my friend Ana Silva wrote an interesting post about a very important topic: digital literacy. Please read her post (and the comments). The main point of her post is that we should not assume people get the internet or get social media and will start working out in the open by themselves. Some do, but many need to be helped. We have to teach them, step-by-step, to be digitally literate. This is hard work.

I’ve written about this topic quite a bit as well using a different term: ‘personal knowledge management’. How do we become more productive working out in the open and using the new (and old) social concepts and tools?

As I wrote in a comment on Ana’s post, this is not a small issue. Recently the Dutch newspaper I read (nrc.nl) ran an extra section of the newspaper about ‘searching in a smarter way on the internet’ (Dutch: Slimmer zoeken op internet’). Very interesting stuff with all kinds of tips & tricks to improve the way you use the internet. But what struck me is the economic implication of digital illiteracy. The University of Twente published a study “Ctrl Alt Delete” and they found that 5.3% of our work time is lost due to digital illiteracy. That’s 10 billion euro’s per year in The Netherlands alone! That’s a lot of money. And there’s a lot of work to do.