The concept of DIY as a base for teaching approach in ICT teacher education how to improve pupils' digital literacy
Abstract
The paper introduces empirical research carried out by authors from the Department of Information Technology and Technical Education at the Faculty of Education, Charles University in Prague who have drawn inspiration from the EU project, 543177-LLP-1-2013-1-ES-KA3-KA3MP, "Do It Yourself in Education: Expanding digital competence to foster student agency and collaborative learning (DIYLAB)". The concept of DIY is not totally new. "DiY culture can be defined as 'a youth-centred and -directed cluster of interests and practices around green radicalism, direct action politics, [and] new musical sounds and experiences... a kind of 1990s counterculture'"(McKay, 1998, p. 2).
DIY promotes the idea that everybody is capable of completing a a wide variety of tasks, by finding resources and interpreting available information. The DIYLab project wants to transform deeply what takes place in schools and to create substantial change in learning and teaching practices. "Everyone has a capacity to think and to learn, to make and to act, to sense and to feel; these processes constitute something enduring about being and becoming" (Atkinson, 2011, xi).
According by Kafai and Pepler (2011) in DIY activities we can include e.g. programming subroutines, apps for mobile technology, webpages design or manuals how to do/make/perform it or how to know to do/make/ perform it. DIY implemented into learning process can considerably contribute to discovery and the acquisition of new digital technology facilities and improve digital literacy.
Most significant is that DIY creators to share with others through digital technology a process of doing/making/performing it and provide others with instruction how to proceed to solve a similar problem. For school education it is a challenge to document in a visible form (animation, video, etc.) and to produce intelligibly a recipe for creation a similar artefact which we can appreciate as a way of self-reflection of learning process how to achieve an idea to do/ make/ perform something.
To apply DIY in schools is to enable our pupils to bring interesting ideas from their out-of school environment into school and to create appropriate conditions at school as to how to realise these ideas as a problem, which has not yet been solved in school, which can be applied as an opportunity to collaborate and to share experiences with others, which can serve as a new resource for others to learn how to do/make/perform such ideas, and in which pupils can apply inquiry-based-learning and gain knowledge from different scientific branches and school subjects to discover interdisciplinary contexts (Sancho-Gil, J.M. et al., 2015).