Since my presentation at #bitnorth (embedded below), the notion of digital literacy – in particular for adults – has really stuck with me. If we give people access to broadband, and they learn how to effectively use the new digital tools, how can we be sure they become digitally literate? And what does that term “digitally literate” actually mean?

I’ve done a bit of googling, and found plenty of information about digital literacy for kids. Which when you think about it is weird, aren’t digital natives supposed to just **know** how to do all things digital?

Here is some of what I’ve found:

• Google has an excellent set of instructional materials that teach how to be a good digital citizen.
• There is also the New Media Literacies project. There I found a list of new media literacy skills, but they seem to be focused on school-aged children.
• The FCC has proposed a “National Digital Literacy Corp” fashioned after Americorp.

My interest now is on finding any existing digital literacy standards for adults. Right now, I spend a lot of time in my job mentoring folks in how to effectively use digital media. So far at least three people I’ve worked with have moved into roles where working with digital media is one (if not the) main function of their job. Which makes me happy, because I am a teacher to my core.

Right now I’m mentoring several senior managers, which when I think about it is weird. They are much more experienced, and have much more insight to the business than I. But they are nervous about participating online. They have the skillset to do what needs to be done to take care of our learners, to move our business. But they are feeling nervous about translating that into action online. So I hold their hands till they are ready. Which is much sooner than they feel comfortable with – its like teaching a kid to ride a bike. You let go when they aren’t looking.

The one-on-one mentoring is very effective, but it is also very time-consuming. It won’t scale. It seems to me that there needs to be a gap analysis done between what a highly literate person can do, and what they need to learn to how do in order to become a highly digitally literate individual. So I’m looking for those adult digital literacy standards, so I can do a bit of analysis and write some instruction. This sounds almost like ADDIE…. >:)

If you know of anyone who has worked on adult digital literacy standards, please let me know! And here is my presentation, slides 10 & 11, plus the appendix are most relevant to this post.

As you know if you are following me on twitter, this semester I am taking two performance classes. This means I’m paying more attention to things that measure performance and performance gaps. Since I’m always hyper-focused on social media, I’m also looking at how emerging tools can be used to close performance gaps.

This report from McKinsey talks about the importance of collaboration to knowledge workers. Interestingly enough, they did an analysis on how things are right now, or the current state of performance of knowledge workers. The report says in some industries knowledge workers make up about 75% of the workplace. The authors found a “performance gap between top and bottom companies in collaboration-intense sectors is nine times that of production- or transaction-intense sectors”. So organizations with knowledge workers have not figured out what sorts of remedies need to be apply to close performace gaps for knowledge workers.

Its actually worse than that – the researches also found that measurements for effective “collaboration productivity” doesn’t really exist. Everyone says they want a highly motivated, highly collaborative workpace, but no one knows how to measure what’s going on now and no one knows how to get people to that highly collaborative state.

The report has a neat tool that breaks up well-known roles by tasks and possible social media tools that could help them be more effective (in a tag cloud no less!).

The report also suggests a very strategic approach to choosing the tools to create the desired collabortive state:

1. Understand the specific requirements of interactive tasks
2. Identify which tasks create disproportionate value for the organization
3. Determining the types of inefficiencies and wasted efforts that bog down many interactions

It is a great report. More and more we’re talking about disruptive technology, but this technology is also going to disrupt our known ways of doing things. We’re going to need folks to get their arms around this idea of measuring performance by what is really going on, not by how things used to get done. And this approach seems like a practical way to blend the new technology into current organizations.

What are you seeing?