Digital Literacies

yesterday I attended the "Changing the Learning Landscape" strategic conversation to look at how we develop digital literacies in our students and embed them in the curriculum through course design and staff development.

One conclusion that came out of those conversations was the need to listen more to our students. What do they already know how to do? (we make a lot of assumptions around their digital competence). What do they want from their lecturers? ("he's got a PhD in blah blah but can't work the projector...." was my quote of the day). What can we learn from them?

I am learning a lot from watching and listening to my students in the Scale Up environment - so much so that every week is a race for me to keep up in re-planning my sessions as I adjust the pace, the technology and the subject matter to fit with where I see they are.

This week I trialled my laminated "Macs for Dummies" guide, but I think that ship has sailed as most now are fairly competent at using them. (I did however have NO queries this week about the physical operation of the Macs, so maybe they did help).

I also gave the students a  READING task - a 9 page article from a medical journal for them to summarise on a whiteboard, working in "tables". This was weirdly old school in such a technology rich environment. My digital literacies twist was that they had to send me a photo record of their whiteboard work. 4 groups used Twitpic or Instagram and tweeted them using our module hashtag, two emailed me and one shared a DropBox photo.

The student mentors/observers commented that they think the Scale Up environment  makes exercises like this much more engaging. In part this is because of the physical layout - the groups working together on tables - in part the session design. In last year's version of this module, students also did exercises in groups but the engagement was less intense. Attendance in each seminar group was fairly low, there was lot of off-topic chatter, texting and generally looking bored. This year, even though attendance is not brilliant, the room FEELS very full and noisy, there is minimal input from me and much more reliance on the students themselves to work out how to do the activities. For some this does cause confusion, but as Sharon comments in the previous post, it also forces them to fall back on their own resources and to ask friends for help.

So, is it working? Well, its probably too early to say but I do think overall that they are developing skills in digital information management as witness the NOW discussion board feedback on finding resources, the tweeted photos, the use of Dropbox.com (as opposed to dropbox in NOW). This week I challenged them to have a go with Evernote and Diigo and I am going to follow that up next week. In later sessions we are going to work together on a whole group presentation using Google Drive. (Hope the network holds up!) But to try and make some sort of objective assessment I am going to repeat my pre-course survey and find out what they think they have learned.