International Journal of Open Educational Resources Volume 2, Issue 1, Fall 2019/Winter 2020 | Page 186

International Journal of Open Educational Resources
own learning (Jacobson et al., 2018).
It can be revelatory for students to realize,
for example, that how they feel
about learning something new (affective)
may have an impact on that learning
(cognitive). They might find that
they want to take action (behavioral)
in the real world based on new knowledge.
Thus, the metaliteracy model is a
framework that organizes the domains
of learning and gives students a sense
that the nature of learning encompasses
many more activities than the cognitive
domain they likely focus on.
Metaliteracy also asks students
to appreciate the different roles that
they as learners occupy in today’s information
environment. It is most common
for students—and for many of the
rest of us—to think of ourselves simply
as consumers of information. The metaliteracy
model extends this, encouraging
students, in a variety of ways,
to think of themselves as information
producers. Thus, part of the metaliteracy
model delineates a variety of active
roles that students consciously or unconsciously
use in their own learning
process, such as “teacher” (how many
times without even thinking about it do
you explain to someone else the facts
of a situation or the meaning of a concept?),
researcher (how many times a
day do you go to Google to look up a
specific set of facts?), or translator (consider
times when you encounter something
in one medium and then “translate”
it into another medium, e.g., talk
to a friend about what you have read).
Thus, metaliteracy emphasizes the variety
of ways that students are able to
go beyond the relatively passive role of
information consumer and take charge
of their learning. The four learning domains
and the learner roles can be seen
in Figure 1: The metaliterate learner.
Figure 1. The metaliterate learner.
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