Paul Glister coined the term “Digital Literacy” in 1997 to suggest a more active engagement with new media, emphasising it was about mastering “ideas, not keystrokes”. As we implement solutions in our institutions that require increasing levels of digitally literacy, we bump into the problem of “mainstreaming”.
This is frequently envisaged as a technical process, involving a formal and managed roll-out. The logistics and scale of this makes it an high-stakes,
high-risk process, and it can become detached from the engaging aspects of early pilots and trials.
As a contrast, the “Digital Literacies as a Postgraduate Attribute”
project (diglitpga.jiscinvolve.org) has adopted a different approach.
This involves a structured process of working with students to generate
detailed accounts of their experiences, with a particular focus on their
struggles and coping strategies.
This has produced resources that influential actors within the institution can then adopt in order to effect changes.
Lesley Gourlay and Martin Oliver will be leading a session on Wednesday 14th November 10:00 – 11:00, and will outline their project and introduce the ways in which they have worked with students to document their experiences.
Participants will be asked to map routes from project data through policy
makers to institutional systems, and think about the work that needs to
be done at each stage to enable this to happen.
Register for the conference.
The fee for Innovating e-Learning 2012 remains unchanged at £50.
Current JISC projects are eligible for one free place, please contact Rob Englebright for details: r.englebright@jisc.ac.uk
