Our Center for Faculty Excellence and Innovation recently held its grand opening. Among the events was our first Emerging Tech Cafe. This was a round table discussion with faculty regarding trends and emerging educational technology that they are either using, or interested in using.
As guide posts for our discussion, we referenced the 2015 NMC Horizon Report which is sponsored by the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative. This report is broken down into 3 broad areas with sub-categories with each. I won’t go over all of the broad categories in this post, suffice to day that our round table discussion focused extensively on digital literacy and the nebulous nature of its definition. There are disparate views of what digital literacy entails, from the ability to search the web to conduct research all the way to coding.
One instructor noted that it is not necessary for students to necessarily be able to code. Rather they must be willing to try something new and push themselves into unfamiliar territory. Some digital natives may not be keen on blogging or creating videos, but they need to be able to not only try something new, but also persist through technical challenges and find solutions using common problem solving strategies that are not exclusive to technical platforms. The ability to break down a problem and work through possible solutions is not specific to technical/digital literacy. It is a universal principle that applies across various curricula.
Other instructors remarked that it’s imperative that students learn to develop an online presence and an understanding of what it means to operate in a networked digital space. Digital literacy can incorporate skills such as coding, but it is just as likely that even our digital natives will need reminders about what it means to be online, how that impacts notions of privacy, meaningful interaction, and persistence of information- meaning, is anything ever truly erased from the web? Think thrice before posting!
We’ll be hosting further Emerging Tech Cafe’s during the semester in order to attempt to probe some of these and other concepts.
“think Coffee” by HeroPsychoDreamer, 2007
Non-Commercial ShareAlike License
Recent Comments