L is for literacy

There’s now a fashion – especially in education, I think – for adding the word “literacy” after another word to make a phrase that sounds portentous, serious and possibly slightly threatening. Threatening in the sense that behind the phrase “literacy” lurks the accusation that you are actually illiterate. So “information literacy”, “digital literacy”, “attention literacy” all threaten us with – at the very least – the prospect of having to claim dyslexia if we fail to meet the grade.

I don’t say these concepts are not useful. I would understand being “literate” in something as meaning that you not only have the skills to master that whatever-it-is, but that you can be reflective about and adaptive of those skills: you have moved beyond learning by rote or acting mechanically, and can build on techniques you have learned.

We have started recently trying to map the relationship between three “literacies” in order to understand better what we should be doing to design a skills framework for civil servants entering the digital world. “IT literacy”, “information literacy” and “digital literacy” all clearly overlap and interrelate. You can only – these days – have information or digital skills with at least some IT skills under your belt. And you can only practise effectively as a policy maker or analyst if you understand both how to gain and use information and how to engage with stakeholders and others using the web.

The diagram illustrates the idea. Bear in mind that this is focused on the needs of an organisation – that is, the skills the corporate body needs us to have. A similar, but not identical, diagram could be drawn to describe these literacies at a more general level – the level, perhaps, required to be a “digital citizen”.

Skills and literacies in the digital age

The fundamental skill set is in IT literacy – from basic skills like keyboarding, up through being able to create designed documents, the manipulation of data, to understanding the concepts and benefits of IT in the business.

IT literacy shades into information literacy at the point at which you can select tools effectively to do the job you want to do – that’s the point at which you move from manipulating content to understanding it. It shades into digital literacy at the point at which you start using tools not only to present but to share. And the activity that stands at the centre of all three skill sets is search.

Information literacy runs from knowing at the basic level what you must do with information – keeping it safe, creating records, acknowledging copyright, etc – through being able to analyse your needs for information, to working out how to retrieve and classify information, to exploiting it for business value. Finally, information literacy shades into policy-making as you turn information into evidence through interpretation.

Similarly, digital literacy ascends from basic online skills – internet banking, say – to being able to put information into a content management system. From there, we move to people being able to manage their digital identity (or identities) – to create a persona that reflects how they want or need to appear in the digital world; and finally, using those skills, to be able to build fully-functioning networks and ranges of interventions and conversations in the digital world that allow you to be authoritative, trusted and respected. This is the point at which digital skills support the traditional policy-makers skill of influencing people’s attitudes and opinions.

Digital and information literacy overlap at the point where you have to be able to assess and manage information risk: the risks, especially, of releasing information you shouldn’t or using information which is not reliable. They also overlap with the policy skills sphere where they are about managing your own networks of resources – people and information sources – which you can nurture and grow as you go through your professional career. A key point to notice is that in future we are likely to be recruiting people who have already – indeed because they have already – built some of these networks as part of their educational progress.

This diagram has only started to be tested within our organisation. Our idea is to use it to support a major shift within the organisation towards digital engagement and effective, sustained internet presence (as opposed to a presence that is patchy and not always effective). To do so, we aim to use the diagram to allow us to map out training and development interventions that will equip civil servants fully to do their job in a digital age. I’ll try and follow the story in this blog: but in the meanwhile, any comments or questions on the diagram or the explanation of it above would be very gratefully received.

Two women in technology

I promised Suw Charman-Anderson (through Pledgebank) that I would blog “publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire” to celebrate Ada Lovelace Day.

Tricky one, this: my boss is a woman, and as Chief Information Officer she probably is “in technology”. And obviously I admire her deeply! But I’m not going to blog about her.

The women I want to celebrate are two of the early pioneers of electronic music: Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire. In referring to these two, it is of course compulsory to refer to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and to the Doctor Who theme. There, I’ve referred to them. It must also be said that it seems clear that the Workshop would not have existed without Oram, nor the Ron Grainger tune have survived so long without Derbyshire. But that’s not the point here.

No, my admiration for these two stems from their immense practicality. That may sound strange when referring to two women whose primary interest was in musique concrète and the outer edges of tonality. But the point is that to Oram and Derbyshire, the technology had purpose.

I like the story about Oram that one of her early jobs was ensuring that concert transmissions were not interrupted by bombing. Essentially, she followed a feed from the Royal Albert Hall and ran a recording of the same work in synch in the studio: if the RAH went down, she switched over to the recording, ideally so smoothly that the listeners wouldn’t even notice. Fakery? Possibly: but also an immensely practical way of helping to make bearable the experience of wartime Britain.

Yes, both women clearly loved technology – the feel of it, the joy of it, the heft of it in their hands (and often in those days the technology had real, physical weight). But they don’t seem to have loved it for its own sake, but because by using it they could explore and expand the frontiers of their art.

So here’s to all women (and men of course – although I’m tempted to say that women are better at this than men) who can keep their eyes firmly focused on the reasons for doing technology even while recognising and celebrating the unexpected, the unexpected, and of course the downright cool that technology itself introduces us to. Two women I would have loved to meet: Delia and Daphne.

D is for…

Disagreement is a fine thing, isn’t it? Just as we learn by making mistakes (or as Dave Snowden puts it, “Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success”), so we advance a debate by exposing our thoughts to discussion and criticism and even ridicule at others’ hands. And now we have tools that enable disagreement to flourish. Yes – that real-time, multi-dimensional, all-singing, all-dancing blogospherical world where endless discourse and discussion and dissent and, yes, disrespecting go on 24/7.

And how does this apply to the political process? Well, there are certainly good signs, as government departments and public bodies embrace – well OK, sometimes flirt timorously with – social media. Ideas of creating “interesting, authentic conversations” with stakeholders or “A National Conversation” on Scotland’s constitutional future are fine brave ideas. But the concept of authenticity is intimately related to the concept of trust: and trust in political discourse is perhaps lower than ever.

No, the political process will only learn from debate when it becomes genuinely transparent: when the mass of people can be convinced that they have real influence over policy. And that means that the process of making (re-making, amending, tweaking…) policy must itself be exposed to the public gaze.

Getting to this point is not easy. The traditional media see debate and discussion as signs of weakness – a blog post by a civil servant that even hints at a different view from that of Ministers will be seen as “undermining”; a Tweet from a Minister that queries government policy will certainly be headlined as a “split”.

Everybody loves a good dramatic story: but sometimes the dramatic stories obfuscate the truth that public bodies have a right to be wrong, a duty to learn from mistakes, and an obligation to debate and discuss and disagree. Historically, this has happened behind closed doors, inevitably weakening the learning process. And if some chinks of light have been let in recently, for example by the Freedom of Information Acts in the UK, they are still only patchy and partial. The real fear is that letting in the light, when accompanied by the derisive hoots of a media that cannot comprehend a political process that works outside of the lobby system, actually withers the trust that we hoped to nurture.

Regrettably, then, D (as this post acrostically spells) is for Danger. It’s also for debate, discussion, devolution… and, most important, democracy.

Networks and not-works

The statistics associated with social networking are colossal: there are 280 million 15-year old kids signed up to FaceBook, and 700 trillion videos on YouTube. And those figures are rubbish, but you probably believed them for about a second. The numbers are huge. But actually size is not only not everything, it’s not even in the same ball game. Because I suggest that what people use social networks to do is to set boundaries to their world. Take the research from the HP Social Computing Lab, which found that actually we return to only a small number of websites and genuinely follow or engage with only a small number of “friends”. Researcher Bernardo Huberman called this a return to the “dawn of the age of intimacy”.

Actually, of course, this is pretty obvious. Web 1.0 – once it moved outside the community of CERN-heads – became huge, amorphous, unfriendly. Information was an unstoppable torrent – remember when “Results 1 – 10 of about  191,000″ was supposed to be a good thing? Even the chat rooms and other interactive features the web offered became too big, too unpredictable, too full of the disruptive and the exploitative. We built something that resembled the financial district of a very large city – on a Sunday. Windswept, slightly (or even very) unsafe, lacking in human scale and human amenities. So people started moving to safer ground and building communities – some of them gated, many of them quite welcoming to strangers, but all of them offering us ways of engaging only with those we choose, by some mechanism or criteria, to engage with.

Now, what about the enterprise? It doesn’t look as though things are much different there. A recent piece of research indicates that the silo is alive and well. Researchers Adam M. Kleinbaum, Toby E. Stuart, Michael L. Tushman sampled more than 100 million emails and 60 million calendar entries from around 30,000 employees of a large company (no, I didn’t make those figures up), and found that most interaction in the enterprise takes place within the immediate business unit. So having got a mega-mammoth email system which enables us instantly to consult and collaborate with colleagues across the entire world, we mostly use it to email the guy in the next desk but one to ask if he’s seen the key to the stationery cupboard. (By the way, Kleinbaum et. al’s research is fascinating – although a lot of it just confirms what you always thought – and I’ll probably return to it in the future).

Note the shift in values here. We think that people building and protecting communities in the wide world is A Good Thing. But in the workplace, we kind of want people to broaden their outlook. We think communication and collaboration between different parts of organisations is good. We think we’ll improve our business if everyone is talking to everyone else – or at least, is willing to do so. In other words, we expect people at work to behave in ways that we know perfectly well they don’t behave in the rest of their life. Well, there’s a surprise.

So, on the assumption that we can work better with the grain rather than against it, can we adapt the strengths of social networking in the not-work arena and pervert them for the purposes of work?

A modified version of this blog appeared elsewhere , but I’ve moved it here to encourage me to follow it up!