Webmaker/WebLiteracyMap/v2/research
Research from academic journals, blog posts, and elsewhere to inform v2.0 of Mozilla's Web Literacy Map v2.0.
2014
This article focuses on users of the web being able to assess the credibility of information:
"There seems to be a pressing need to develop a “web literacy” approach especially with the emergence of technologies like social software, wikis, blogs, open source systems and what is known as the Web 2.0 movement. Web literacy, a term first coined by Sorapure, Inglesby and Yatchisin (1998), has been defined as “an ability to recognize and assess a wide range of rhetorical situations and an attentiveness conveyed in a source’s non-textual features. Teaching such a literacy means supplementing the evaluative criteria traditionally applied to print sources with new strategies for making sense of diverse kinds of texts presented in hyper textual and multimedia formats” (Sorapure, Inglesby and Yatchisin, 1998)."
Keshavarz, H. (2014). How Credible is Information on the Web:
Reflections on Misinformation and Disinformation. Infopreneurship Journal, 1(2), 1-17.
2013
The 'specific skills' required for the web are discussed in this article, but the authors only focus upon navigation and credibility:
"Web literacy refers to the skills needed for successful web navigation Texas Journal of Literacy Education (November, 2008). Online reading requires specific skills, and these skills are often referred to by educators in K- 12 settings as web literacy skills. Classroom practices often involve research and “the rules of research have changed with society’s move from paper to digital information” (November, 2008, p. 6). Web literacy may fit under the umbrella of New Literacies in that it relates directly to skills needed to locate information accurately and effectively. Web literacy is also reflective of digital literacies, as it is a term used to explain knowledge an individual needs to find information, to examine content, to find out who published a Web site, and to see who is linked to a site (November, 2008)."
Pilgrim, J. & Martinez, E.E. (2013). Defining Literacy in the 21st Century:
A Guide to Terminology and Skills. Texas Journal of Literacy Education, 1(1), 60-69.
'Web literacy' in this article means effectively navigating the web:
"The two terms that seem most practitioner-friendly are web literacy and digital literacy. Web literacy, as the term implies, describes a user’s Internet navigation skills as well as critical thinking skills required to evaluate online information. This term is not as broad as digital literacy, but the skills provide teachers with concrete ways to help students search for accurate and reliable information in a safe Internet environment (November, 2008). This type of information and support for teachers has enabled educators to develop curriculum for teaching literacy skills."
Pilgrim, J. & Martinez, E.E. (2013). Defining Literacy in the 21st Century:
A Guide to Terminology and Skills. Texas Journal of Literacy Education, 1(1), 60-69.
2012
Rafi Santo (involved in Mozilla's Hive networks) talks of 'hacker literacies' which seems to encapsulate more of what Mozilla means by 'web literacy' - but also goes beyond this:
"I define hacker literacies as empowered participatory practices, grounded in critical mindsets, that aim to resist, reconfigure, and/or reformulate the sociotech- nical digital spaces and tools that mediate social, cultural, and political participation. These “critical mindsets” include perceiving how values are at play in the design of these spaces and tools; understand- ing how those designs affect the behaviors of users of those spaces and tools; and developing empow- ered outlooks, ones that assume change is possible, in relation to those designs and rooted in an under- standing of their malleability. “Empowered participatory practices” include making transparent for others the effects of sociotechnical designs and the values at play therein, voicing alternative values for these designs, advocating and taking part in alternative designs when spaces and tools are misaligned with one’s values, and employing new media as a means to change those digital spaces and tools—whether on the social or technological level—via social or technological means (Santo, forthcoming)."
Santo, R. (2011). Hacker Literacies: Synthesizing Critical
and Participatory Media Literacy Frameworks. International Journal of Learning and Media, 3(3), 1-5.
New literacy researchers are fond of claiming that their favoured term subsumes other terms. Here, information literacy is said to encapsulate web literacy:
"Information literacy is about accessing and analyzing information, and Web literacy is a subset of information literacy which involves applying those skills online and being able to recognize obscured intent and pay attention to non-textual features (Burke, 2002; Kuiper, Volman, & Terwel, 2009; Sorapure, Inglesby & Yatchisin, 1998). In other words, Web users must sort through both textual and visual cues to determine the credibility of information online."
Pariera, K. L. (2012). Information Literacy on the Web: How College Students Use Visual
and Textual Cues to Assess Credibility on Health Websites. Communications in Information Literacy, 6(1), 34-48.
This article, while referencing some critique, cites Prensky's widely-discredited 'digital natives/immigrants' approach'. It seems to argue that intensity of the use of the web can be correlated with 'literacy':
"Apart from social networks, one can discern another element of the transition to this new Web era; that of the increased level of digital literacy among people. One can at this stage distinguish between people who grew up using the Web, the ‘digital natives’(Prensky, 2001) on the one hand, and ‘digital immigrants’ with increased digital literacy, potentially honed by higher involvement in the Web activity, on the other hand. The differences between natives and immigrants are a topic of debate (Bennett, Maton, & Kervin, 2008) but one could argue that, overall, there has been an increase in Web literacy levels, based on the high number of users and intensity of use."
Hall, W., & Tiropanis, T. (2012). Web evolution and Web science.
Computer Networks, 56(18), 3859-3865.
2011
This project for a doctoral thesis focused on web literacy and discusses how difficult it is to teach the relevant skills in isolation:
"If we accept that literacy skills and practices are seen as social, cultural, political and economic, then Web literacy skills should be viewed in the same way."
Brown, A. (2011). Teaching web literacy in the age of new literacies (Doctoral dissertation, University of Victoria).
"According to Kuiper, Volman and Terwel (2009), Web literacy is a concept that is comprised of “a combination of various skills regarding the critical use of the Web for one‟s own purposes” (p. 669). Web literacy skills can be divided into three subcategories that including searching on the Web, reading on the Web, and evaluating on the Web (Kuiper, Volman, & Terwell, 2009)."
Brown, A. (2011). Teaching web literacy in the age of new literacies (Doctoral dissertation, University of Victoria).
"A 2009 article published in Career World discussed skills that students should not leave high school without and ranked “Web literacy” as number one (Reece, 2009). Reece (2009) defined Web literacy as “the ability to access, analyze, and evaluate online information” (p. 21); but Web literacy is a complex set of skills unique to its environment and requires a more nuanced definition. Kuiper, Volman, and Terwel (2009) propose that Web literacy is “the ability to handle the Web critically” (p. 669). They include three skills within their definition of Web literacy: Web searching skills, which includes using appropriate key words, locating relevant information, and knowing different ways to locate information; Web reading skills, which is the ability to interpret the results of search engines (such as Google), understanding and using hypertext, and knowing which information to choose and which to disregard; and Web evaluating skills such as assessing the reliability and validity of sources and relating text images to various sites (Kuiper, Volman, & Terwel, 2009, pp. 669-670)."
Brown, A. (2011). Teaching web literacy in the age of new literacies (Doctoral dissertation, University of Victoria).