Reflections from a Research Assistant

What does digital literacy mean to you?

This was the first question on our pilot investigation. In hindsight, there’s already some limitations to this question, which we identified following a response of ‘it is important to me..’, indicating the questions ambiguity.

The experience of organising a pilot investigation has helped us to be better informed for our future research, namely interviews and focus groups. We now understand how to better pose questions to keep the responses focused on our research aims. Something that as students, will also help us with our own research projects for third year and postgraduate studies.

In comparison to TECH4all #1, we had far better engagement with our pilot investigation, collating 40 responses over a two hour period. Perhaps this was down to the time of year? or our confidence growing as research assistants? It may also be due to a change in strategy from last year’s research efforts.

As TECH4all #2 focuses on digital literacy, we felt it was appropriate to set up the pilot investigation (a short survey) online. This in itself posed some problems when the wifi connection went down part way through a respondent completing the survey, and certain devices supporting the survey better than others. However, the ease of accessibility may have a part to play in the number of responses we received in a short period of time.

Another benefit of using a digital survey was the time it saved us. Having all of the responses available to import to excel saved a lot of time that would have been spent collating and typing up responses had we used good, old-fashioned pen and paper. We would happily trade the hours spent transcribing for a little bit of wifi inconsistency and ‘low battery’ reminders.

Another interesting point to raise is the assumptions we had prior to collecting the preliminary data, and how different these were from the responses we received. This was an eye opener and highlighted to us the importance of a pilot investigation, as we can ensure that we better focus our future data collection based on the preliminary data. We now have a small insight into the understanding and experiences of digital literacy of the students here at the University of Northampton.

Project to date:

We have collected information surrounding digital literacy from a range of students, and we are currently in the middle of short interviews with academic and professional staff. Keep an eye out on our blog for updates on our interviews and future digital literacy focused research.