Digital artefacts and the digital divide: Exploring the nexus between critical digital literacy and critical virtual exchange

Abstract

Virtual exchange (VE) occurs across diverse digital spaces and formats, both within single subjects and in cross-curricular settings. However, VE is not inherently equitable. Many people lack reliable internet or hardware, contributing to a “digital divide” that reinforces or creates digital inequalities (Satar & Hauck, 2021). In addition, successful communication in VE requires critical skills, such as Critical Digital Literacy (CDL). This contribution draws on the Critical Virtual Exchange (CVE) framework (Hauck, 2023), which views VE through a social justice lens, and is informed by CDL (Satar et al., 2023), to explore two exchanges: one lacking CVE characteristics and one that embodies them. In the CVE-informed case, students demonstrated “awareness of meaning-making potentials – affordances and limitations – of digital media” and were able to “exercise agency while gaining intercultural understandings”, both defining characteristics of CDL (Satar et al., 2023, p. 75). Here, we first present a revised overview of approaches to VE (O’Dowd, 2018). We then position the two VE cases within CVE. Both cases involved participant production of multimodal digital artefacts. Our contrasting analysis, informed by multimodal discourse analysis (LeVine & Scollon, 2004) and visual grammar (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006), highlights what is absent when VE lacks a critical foundation for CDL. Awareness of meaning-making potentials and the ability to exercise agency, we propound, is a core characteristic of digital producers and consumers who are cognisant of implicit ideologies in everyday digital practices. Sensitising learners in this respect should be part of the Critical Virtual Exchange that takes account of multimodality.