Students’ access to digital literacy at a South African university: Privilege and marginalisation

Abstract Lifelong learning has become associated with participation in the digital age, affecting everything from access to information technology, to its use in teaching and learning. It is therefore inevitable that educationists turn to digital literacy practices to examine their contribution to, and influence on, learning. This article explores the digital literacy practices of a group of higher education students with minimal previous access to digital resources, as well as how they compensate for uneven access, with a view to examining what they perceive to be challenges and possibilities offered by technology. Thus the article highlights how they are 'caught-between' two worlds: the technologicised and non-technologicised. The work is framed by New Literacy Studies, which suggests that literacy is a contextualised practice positioned in relation to social institutions and the power relations that sustain them (Gee, 1996). Emerging themes indicate that students perceive digital practices to have symbolic value, and provide access to cultural capital. View correction statement:Erratum Notes 1 South Africa has 187 649 domains and 3002 websites, compared with Angola, for instance, with 8 domains and 136 websites (Chisholm, 2004). 2 It is a common occurrence at university for students who are not computer literate to pay others to type their assignments. The researcher noted this practice at postgraduate level as well. 3 Lave and Wenger (1996) use the term 'communities of practice' to show how individuals bond through activities to establish consensus, create identity, and accomplish goals. 4 The researcher set up an exchange programme through the online component of the class where the students communicated with students at an overseas university in order to practice their writing skills in an authentic context. 5 While the use of e-mail and discussion thread language may be regarded as a corruption of writing skills, because of the non-standard use of the language, Warschauer (in Ancker, 2002: 5–6) argues that the use of language in electronic media should be considered as a different register. The extent to which writing and reading skills actually improved, as opposed to being perceived as improved, was not focused on in this study.