At university, you're constantly working with digital information — watching, reading, analysing, creating, sharing, and presenting it in all kinds of formats. To do this confidently and responsibly, you will need a range of digital literacies.
Media literacy and Data literacy are the main ones covered here, but they aren’t the only ones. There are other digital literacies that can help you navigate study, work, and everyday life, including:
Health literacy – finding and assessing reliable online health information
Visual literacy – interpreting and creating visual content like infographics or diagrams
AI literacy – understanding how AI tools work, and using them critically
Each of these literacies helps you make informed decisions and become a more capable and confident digital citizen.
Media literacy is about understanding how digital messages are created, shared, and interpreted — and how you engage with them as both a consumer and a creator. At university, you encounter media in many forms: academic videos, podcasts, news stories, social media posts, infographics, interactive websites, and more. You also produce media yourself — whether that's a presentation, a blog post, a TikTok, or a research project.
To be media literate, you need to ask:
Who made this and why?
What message is being communicated, and how is it being shaped by the medium?
How do I use media responsibly and ethically in my own academic work?
Key Skills in Media Literacy
Critically evaluate media messages: Understand the purpose, bias, and credibility of what you’re seeing, hearing, or reading
Engage with different formats: Analyse and interpret text, graphics, video, audio, animations, games, and simulations. Recognise how each format influences the message.
Create media thoughtfully: Consider audience, accessibility, and design when creating your own content
Understand media’s role in society: Be aware of how digital media shape political views, cultural trends, and educational practices — and how algorithms influence what you see.
Use media ethically: Know your responsibilities around copyright, referencing, and plagiarism. Explore open licences (like Creative Commons) and understand how AI tools affect authorship and attribution.
Prioritise accessibility: Consider how your media choices affect users with different needs. This includes both technical (e.g. mobile-friendly design) and intellectual (e.g. clarity of language) accessibility.
Think critically. Create responsibly. Communicate clearly.
Data literacy is the ability to work with data confidently and responsibly — from collecting and analysing it, to interpreting and presenting it clearly. At university, you may handle data in lab results, surveys, spreadsheets, or dashboards. Whether you're working with statistics in a report or visualising findings in a presentation, data literacy helps you draw meaningful, ethical conclusions.
Key Skills in Data Literacy
Collect and manage data effectively using tools such as spreadsheets, forms or databases to collect and organise data
Analyse data to draw insights, look for trends and patterns in data sets, and think critically about what the numbers mean
Present data clearly and professionally, use appropriate charts, graphs and dashboards to visualise data, to tell a story and support your argument
Think critically about context, understand how the data was collected, what it can and can’t tell you and avoid drawing misleading conclusions
Protect data and respect privacy, know how to handle personal and sensitive information, don’t upload private data to AI tools
Understand the numbers. Tell the story. Handle data with care.
