Enhancing students’ digital literacy skills through their technology use in a course-based research project

With the increasing importance of technological developments for students in higher education, it is essential to incorporate digital literacies into the higher education curriculum. This paper reports on a study which examined students’ development of digital literacy skills through the completion of a sociolinguistics research project. The project, which consisted of a number of assessment tasks, including the production of a website and a video, was incorporated into a sociolinguistics course offered to undergraduate students at a university in Hong Kong. It was found that students’ use of technology in the completion of the project facilitated their development of various digital literacy skills, including branching literacy, information literacy, reproduction literacy and socio-emotional literacy. While students’ development of photo-visual literacy was somewhat constrained by the nature and requirements of the assessment tasks, students reported that they gained invaluable information and communication technology skills that could benefit their life-long learning. Teachers in the higher education sector are recommended to implement similar technologically-based, discovery-enriched assessment tasks within their existing curricula to enhance students’ digital literacy skills. It is also recommended that students be given more opportunities to make use of visual graphics so as to enhance their photo-visual literacy.