Reading the Digital, Reading the Message: Digital Literacy as Media Literacy (DIGI-ME)

Digital literacy is often reduced to operational competence — the ability to use devices, platforms and applications. Yet in data-saturated, algorithmically mediated environments, operating a technology is inseparable from interpreting what it produces, recommends and conceals. 

This workshop, Reading the digital, Reading the Message: Digital Literacy as Media Literacy, advances the DIGI-ME premise that genuine digital competence is a critical, interpretive practice: every interface is also a message, every feed an editorial act, every search result a curated rather than neutral artefact.

During the workshop, participants will:

• Trace a single claim through three environments — a retrievable web source, a personalised social feed, and a generative AI chatbot — applying the source-checking method they already trust, and watching it work, then strain, then fail (generative AI output has no origin to trace, since it is predicted rather than retrieved).
• Build, from their own experience rather than a handed-out taxonomy, a five-lens reading framework: Relation, Generation, Agency, Contingency and Care.
• Redesign one ranking rule in a system they use daily, converting critical suspicion into a constructive, examinable alternative rather than blanket cynicism.
• Commit to one concrete practice of re-appropriation (not abstinence) and map the five lenses onto their own teaching or learning path.

Participants leave with a personalised five-lens reading card, a first-hand experience of watching a trusted method fail, one adopted practice, and a mapping of the framework onto their own learning or teaching context. Outputs (reflective protocols and anonymised lab logs) feed back into the DIGI-ME learning materials, QA framework and Targeted Skills Framework.