Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Digital literacy and the I-Curriculum project (05 Aug 2004) If asked to assess a student's web page on the life cycle of the frog, what things would you look at? At a simple level you could form an assessment scheme relating to presentation and content. Has the student mastered how to change the background colour, insert links, pictures, and change font size? Are these links relevant, the text and pictures appropriate to the audience, do they show an understanding of frogs? In the I-Curriculum project we have classed these skills as: (i) operational, and (ii) integrating. The operational is the 'how to' skill, be it formatting in a word processor, searching a database or in this case being able to insert a sound of a frog croaking, while working at the integrating level requires the student to show an understanding of the goal and context - students must use language and technology systems appropriately as they are participating in an authentic form of social practice. However, what if our student started to critique the tool used to present the frog's life cycle? To suggest better ways of presenting the information, like attaching a device that can physically demonstrate how a frog leaps? Our original marking scheme is insufficient. The student is displaying transformed thinking, the technology is now taken for granted and being used in a way that is original to the student. Thus there is a third skill set that can be acquired in addition to operational and integrating; we have termed this transformational. Article URL: http://www.nestafuturelab.org/viewpoint/art32.htm Read 114 more articles from NESTA Futurelab sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Feature: The Design Virus - Pursuing Originality doesn't Work     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy