Digital Literacy Practices in Educational Settings
Summary
Digital literacy in educational settings encompasses the constellation of skills, understandings and attitudes that enable learners and educators to access, critically evaluate, create and communicate information through digital technologies. It involves not only technical proficiency but also critical thinking, ethical awareness and collaborative engagement across a range of devices and platforms. Practices include multimodal composition, enquiry-based learning with digital tools, and the integration of online resources into curricula to support personalised and inclusive education. Recent global disruptions have accelerated the adoption of blended and remote modalities, highlighting both new opportunities for connectivity and persistent inequalities in access and support. Effective digital literacy initiatives attend to curricular alignment, professional development for teachers, robust infrastructure and co-construction of knowledge with learners. At its core, digital literacy is dynamic and context-sensitive, drawing on theoretical foundations from information literacy, media literacy and socio-technical systems to foster agency, empowerment and lifelong learning in formal and informal settings worldwide.
Research from Nature Portfolio
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Research from all publishers
An analysis of the “digital native” concept using topic-modelling techniques reveals how the term has been continuously reconfigured since its inception, with successive scholarly mutations responding to empirical challenges and diversifying its application beyond generational stereotypes. This work highlights the importance of tracing conceptual lineages to avoid uncritical acceptance of metaphors in education discourse. A large-scale study of teachers’ digital competence in the post-COVID era demonstrates that digital nativeness among educators interacts significantly with institutional leadership capital to influence the intensity and effectiveness of technology integration, underscoring the need for strategic support structures and targeted professional development. A foundational theoretical framework for digital agency argues that equity in and through education depends on fostering three interrelated dimensions—competence, confidence and accountability—thereby shifting the focus from mere skills acquisition to the cultivation of purposeful, socially responsible digital practice across diverse learner populations.
Digital Literacy Practices in Educational Settings publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in digital literacy practices in educational settings across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Digital literacy: The ability to access, evaluate, produce and communicate information using digital technologies, incorporating critical thinking and ethical engagement.
Digital competence: The set of knowledge, skills and attitudes required to use digital tools effectively and adaptively in educational and professional contexts.
Digital agency: The capacity to act intentionally and ethically in digital environments, underpinned by competence, confidence and accountability.
Digital native: A heuristic label for individuals presumed to have grown up with digital technologies, whose applicability and accuracy have been subject to critical scrutiny.
References
- Digital natives in the scientific literature: A topic modeling approach. Computers in Human Behavior (2024).
- Teachers’ digital competence in the post COVID-19 era: The effects of digital nativeness, and digital leadership capital. Contemporary Educational Technology (2023).
- Digital Agency: Empowering Equity in and through Education. Technology, Knowledge and Learning (2018).
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