A group of institutions is collaborating to identify what digital agility means in the liberal arts and to encourage the use of that definition to guide institutional initiatives that involve digital agility …
Event: Pre-Conference Liberal Arts Workshop at ELI (Session)
Title: Local and Global Decisions: Digital Competency Initiatives, Development and Assessment
Date: February 19, 2019
Venue: EDUCAUSE ELI Annual Conference
Location: Anaheim, California
Registration: Opens Nov 5
Time: 8am-11am PT
Facilitators:
Abstract: Digital competency initiatives begin from shared global objectives but must adapt to local culture and structures to succeed. Collaboration helps define needs and goals, but how can we collaboratively assess programs that adopt intensely local variations? In this pre-conference workshop, we will present multiple examples of program development with overlapping goals. After examining existing efforts on attendees’ campuses, they will develop plans for their own initiatives, considering local circumstances. We will then brainstorm with participants about how to collaboratively assess the impact of digital competency initiatives. Moreover, we will determine what evidence of impact would be meaningful to different stakeholders.
The LACOL Digital Competencies Working Group has formed to build on prior work related to Digital Competencies, Digital Studies, Digital Fluency, and Digital Literacy. These terms cover a group of related concepts, all of which reflect concepts and skills that are vital to the 21st Century learner and citizen … what we might call Digital Agility.
New Publication:
Digital Agility: Embracing a Holistic Approach to Digital Literacy in the Liberal Arts
by Beth Bohstedt and Sundi Richard (Jan 8, 2020, EDUCAUSEreview, Transforming Higher Ed.) This post, co-authored by Sundi and Beth, developed out of ongoing working group discussions in 2019.
The goals of the working group are to make concrete progress on ideas develop at the 2017 Think Tank and 2018 discussions. LACOL members are invited to join the group; reach out for more information!
Roadmap:
JANUARY 2019 – Create a statement about using the Bryn Mawr Digital Competencies Framework as the starting point for developing institution specific frameworks. Read More
Session: Digital Competencies and Digital Studies
Discussion Leaders:
Date/Time: Thursday, May 31, 9:30am-10:30am
Location: Weitz 236
Pre-workshop activity/instructions: Group annotation of the BMC Framework
To build upon foundations laid at the Think Tank on Digital Competencies at Davidson College last fall, an interactive session exploring digital competencies and digital studies across the curriculum will be featured at the the 2018 Summer Workshop.
This discussion will focus on how digital competencies and digital studies programs connect with faculty priorities and practices for teaching and learning in the physical and virtual classroom and how digital competencies support and relate to other learning goals.
To approach these questions, Siesing and Mason will guide:
As input into this discussion, all workshop attendees are invited and encouraged to share reflections in advance by joining in the Group annotation of the BMC Framework.
Name: Depolluting the Web: Information Environmentalism in Education
Date: Thursday, May 31st
Time: 2:10pm-3:50pm
Location: Weitz 235
Facilitators:
Session Description:
The web is polluted. The digital platforms where we learn and connect are replete with misinformation and threats to our wellbeing and privacy. We know that toxic digital information environments impact our daily lives, and the lives of our students, in everything from politics, to policy, to interactions in public and private spheres.
What can we do? What does informed participation or activism look like in these polluted web platforms?
In this hands-on session, we’ll “get our hands dirty” to better understand the drivers of mis/disinformation on the web (i.e., how our digital information environments become polluted) and begin to take actions to clean up those environments. Dubbed “Information Environmentalism” by Mike Caulfield, this work aims to depollute the web platforms where we find (mis)information and where we connect for social and educational purposes.
Information environmentalism embraces agency–rather than hopelessness and withdrawal–and because of this, we think it is a necessary part of digital literacy education in a liberal arts curriculum. Read More
The concept of digital competencies (also known as digital fluencies, literacies or dexterities) reflects the need for students to develop digital skills and critical perspectives as lifelong learners prepared for scholarship, work and life in the 21st century. Recently, Bryn Mawr College has developed a digital competencies framework focused on these five areas:
Bryn Mawr’s framework served as the basis for the excellent Think Tank on Digital Competencies last fall at Davidson College which attracted a vibrant group of faculty, librarians and technologists from across the liberal arts.
For faculty and staff across LACOL to build upon foundations laid at the Think Tank, an interactive session exploring digital competencies across the curriculum will be held at the 2018 Summer Workshop. This discussion will focus on how digital competencies connect with faculty priorities and practices for teaching and learning in the physical and virtual classroom, and how digital competencies support and relate to higher order learning goals.
As input to the workshop discussion, we are inviting groups of faculty, staff and students to annotate a copy of the Bryn Mawr Digital Competencies Framework using a collaborative annotation tool called Hypothesis. This tool is easy to use and allows everyone in a group to add and comment on annotations overlayed on top of any web document through a shared view. Shared annotation for the BMC Framework can help to reveal key trends and themes that will serve as a starting point for face to face discussion at the workshop.
In October 2017, Davidson College hosted a LACOL event called the Think Tank on Digital Competencies. A mix of faculty, campus leaders, librarians, technologists, and instructional designers from liberal arts colleges across the country focused first on the Bryn Mawr College Digital Competencies Program (https://www.brynmawr.edu/digitalcompetencies), tracing its history, motivations, and impacts for students, faculty, and the institution. Design thinking was then used to explore how digital liberal arts leaders may approach similar goals on their campuses.
To follow up on a great think tank, the two webinars described below are being offered in January 2018 as a way open up this work on developing a Digital Competencies Framework to those who could not attend the in person event and to continue this conversation.
PLEASE JOIN! These webinars are open to everyone through PLACE, the Partnership for Liberal Arts Collaboration and Exploration, https://p-lace.org.
Tuesday, January 9 | 3pm – 4pm Eastern
EDU-PLACE Webinar
(The Workshop 1 event has past; check the EDU-PLACE list for related resources)
Presenters:
In this session, Bryn Mawr College staff will discuss why and how the college developed and launched a digital competencies program. This institutional focus on digital competency reflects our commitment to ensuring students develop digital skills and critical perspectives as lifelong learners prepared for work and life in the 21st century. We will talk about how to develop a framework that’s meaningful within your institutional context, ways to leverage college partnerships and build on campus initiatives, and approaches to integrating digital competencies across the student’s curricular and co-curricular experience.
This is the first of two related workshops; the next is “Hands-on Digital Competencies Program Design” on January 16.
Tuesday, January 16 | 2pm – 3pm Eastern
EDU-PLACE Webinar
(The Workshop 2 event has past; check the EDU-PLACE list for related resources)
Presenters:
This is an active session that is meant to follow the “Overview of BMC’s Digital Competencies Framework” session on January 9th. We recommend you join this session with a group of 3 – 5 people, as you will be doing timed design thinking activities together. Each group will work through a guided ideation process to establish the goals and components for an institutional digital competencies framework and map out next steps for local program development. The facilitators will provide prompts and examples each step of the way.
• See reflection and photos from Think Tank co-lead G. Siesing, Bryn Mawr College.
• Join two follow up webinars from the BMC & Davidson teams via EDU-PLACE in January.
At this think tank event hosted by Davidson College, a mix of faculty, campus leaders, librarians, technologists, and instructional designers from liberal arts colleges across the country focused first on the Bryn Mawr College Digital Competencies Program (https://www.brynmawr.edu/digitalcompetencies), tracing its history, motivations, and impacts for students, faculty, and the institution.
It was a great event – interesting and fun. I was surprised how much we accomplished in a short period of time. Thanks to all!
__________________– Janet Scannell, Chief Technology Officer, Carleton College
Next, the Davidson team facilitated a design thinking session for some rapid prototyping to explore related interest across our institutions, many of whom are exploring and building similar kinds of programs and looking for frameworks to share and adapt.
The concepts of digital competencies and digital fluency reflect the need for students to develop digital skills and critical perspectives as lifelong learners prepared for work and life in the 21st century. There is growing recognition of the importance of integrating these skills into a well-rounded liberal arts education. Recently, Bryn Mawr College has developed a digital competencies framework focused on these five areas:
The main outcomes from this workshop will be to create a community of practice around design, development, and facilitation of digital competency/dexterity/fluency programs in the liberal arts and to identify ongoing ways of sharing program models and resources. Individual institutional teams will also be able to adapt and expand Bryn Mawr’s digital competencies framework as appropriate for local contexts. We hope that LACOL and other LAC partners might also at some point build on the BMC digital competencies framework as an expression of foundational capabilities that we agree on across liberal art institutions as relevant for scholarship, learning, work, and life in the digital age. A shared framework can provide a pathway to accelerate stated LACOL goals for creative collaboration in digital experimentation, faculty development, and research.
Follow up events and webinars are planned. Faculty, instructional designers, leadership, career development center directors, and others engaged in thinking through digital competency frameworks for the liberal arts are encouraged to join the conversation. Watch this space! Read More
■ Multicampus Microlearning 2023
SHARED CLASSES - SUMMER 2023
■ Applied Machine Learning
■ Digital Humanities
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