Digital Literacy and Preparing Students for the Workforce
Digital Technology Is Changing the Career Landscape
- People are living longer.
- Technology can now augment and extend our own abilities.
- Daily life is now computational as innovations in sensors and processing make our world a programmable system.
- Our new media ecology and advances in communications systems require media literacies beyond text.
- Social technologies are driving new forms of production and value creation.
- Our world is now globally connected, highlighting diversity and adaptability.
Digital Literacy Is a Professional Competency
media-rich education, including interactive approaches such as digital storytelling or remix education, ensures that students are familiar with modern tools and “natural language” modes of expression. We are increasingly moving into what many scholars consider a post-literate world, one in which images, video, and the written or spoken word are used fluidly together, symbiotically, to communicate increasingly complex concepts. Modern rhetoric now includes TED talks, animated lectures, visual essays, and a plethora of other interactive and dynamic multimedia.
Smart Classrooms = Smart Workers
ten, technology-oriented strengths as “must haves” for future employers:
- An ability to determine deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed via all mediums.
- An ability to connect with others in a meaningful and direct way via modern technologies and our global networks.
- A proficiency in problem-solving and critical analysis, especially when working with digital relationships or data.
- An ability to adapt to different cultural settings and modalities, necessitated by our global media ecosystem.
- An ability to translate specific information and data into abstracts while understanding the underlying reasoning.
- An ability to critically assess and develop content that uses evolving digital media, leveraging these tools for direct and persuasive communication.
- A transdisciplinary, multimedia mindset that eschews specialized or localized intelligences.
- A design or goal-oriented mindset that employs systems thinking and that develops tasks and work processes towards a desired outcome.
- An ability to discriminate and filter both digital and analog information for importance, while maximizing cognitive and productivity efficiencies.
- An ability to work productively and innovatively via virtual collaboration.
Digital Backpack, is certainly one of the first steps, as is developing an educational framework within which students can meanfully and productively interrogate our technologically driven world.
To learn more about incorporating media in the classroom, download Digital Literacy On-Demand: Visualizing Best Practices in Higher Education, our guide to best practices for multimodal learning and digital media on campus.
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More on digital literacy in this IMS blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=digital+literacy
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more on digital storytelling in this IMS blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=digital+storytelling
Humanities need convincing data to demonstrate their value, says expert
Humanities scholars have always been good at conveying the importance of their work through stories, writes Paula Krebs for Inside Higher Ed, but they have been less successful at using data to do so. This need not be the case, adds Krebs, who recounts a meeting with faculty members, local employers, and public humanities representatives to discuss how to better measure the impact of a humanities education on graduates. Krebs offers a list of recommendations and concrete program changes, such as interviewing employers about their experiences with hiring graduates, that might help humanities programs better prepare students for postgraduate life.
Academica Group <today@academica.ca>
Adding Good Data to Good Stories
https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2016/04/22/importance-developing-hard-data-about-value-humanities-essay
a list of the skills that we think graduates have cultivated in their humanities education:
- Critical thinking
- Communications skills
- Writing skills, with style
- Organizational skills
- Listening skills
- Flexibility
- Creativity
- Cultural competencies, intercultural sensitivity and an understanding of cultural and historical context, including on global topics
- Empathy/emotional intelligence
- Qualitative analysis
- People skills
- Ethical reasoning
- Intellectual curiosity
As part of our list, we also agreed that graduates should have the ability to:
- Meet deadlines
- Construct complex arguments
- Provide attention to detail and nuance (close reading)
- Ask the big questions about meaning, purpose, the human condition
- Communicate in more than one language
- Understand differences in genre (mode of communication)
- Identify and communicate appropriate to each audience
- Be comfortable dealing with gray areas
- Think abstractly beyond an immediate case
- Appreciate differences and conflicting perspectives
- Identify problems as well as solving them
- Read between the lines
- Receive and respond to feedback
Then we asked what we think our graduates should be able to do but perhaps can’t — or not as a result of anything we’ve taught them, anyway. The employers were especially valuable here, highlighting the ability to:
- Use new media, technologies and social media
- Work with the aesthetics of communication, such as design
- Perform a visual presentation and analysis
- Identify, translate and apply skills from course work
- Perform data analysis and quantitative research
- Be comfortable with numbers
- Work well in groups, as leader and as collaborator
- Take risks
- Identify processes and structures
- Write and speak from a variety of rhetorical positions or voices
- Support an argument
- Identify an audience, research it and know how to address it
- Know how to locate one’s own values in relation to a task one has been asked to perform
- Reflect
Strategies for Teaching Culturally Diverse Learners
February 28, 2016 in Volume 6, Dr. Hope J. Hartman
the author explores the importance of understanding the multidimensional of cultural diversity and inclusion and how this understanding can be used by professors and instructors to more effectively develop varied instructional strategies which will allow them to teach with better cultural responsiveness. The author describes a variety of approaches she has used in highly diverse classrooms with undergraduate and graduate teacher education students.
Teaching with cultural responsiveness means applying strategies for culturally responsive teaching in my own courses. Teaching for cultural responsiveness means that students, pre and in-service teachers, should implement culturally responsive teaching strategies with their own preK-12 or higher education students.
Maturity
Both pre and in-service teachers are aware of culturally specific behavioral norms that result in discrepancies between the culture of many black students and the culture of the classroom. To address this gap, my students learn strategies for “culturally responsive social skills instruction” specifically designed for black adolescent males
Intelligence
Learning about this research helps students realize that even when they think that they are being responsive to cultural differences, they might be blinded by a cultural lens of invalid assumptions, causing them to lose sight of important cultural differences that can affect thinking and learning.
Cultural Identity
Everyone should realize that cultural stereotypes affecting identity go beyond race and ethnicity. For many people, their identity as adults is defined by their careers.
Gender identity/sexual orientation
Making LGBTQ resources and discussions a formal part of the curriculum helps to create a safe and accepting environment for the LGBTQ community, including not only people who identify as such, but also their parents, relatives, friends and teachers.
Special needs learners
http://2016libtechconference.sched.org/event/69f9/come-on-down-gaming-in-the-flipped-classroom#
Instruction and Liaison Librarian, University of Northern Iowa
games and gamification. the semantics are important. using the right terms can be crucial in the next several years.
gamification for the enthusiasm. credit course with buffet. the pper-to-peer is very important
gaming types
affordability; east to use; speed to create.
assessment. if you want heavy duty, SPSS kind of assessment, use polldaddy or polleverywhere.
Kahoot only Youtube, does not allow to upload own video or use Kaltura AKA Medispace, text versus multimedia
Kahoot is replacing Voicethread at K12, use the wave
Kahoot allows to share the quizzes and surveys
Kahoot is not about assessment, it is not about drilling knowledge, it is about conversation starter. why do we read an article? there is no shame in wrong answer.
the carrot: when they reach the 1000 points, they can leave the class
Kahoot music can be turned off, how short, the answers are limited like in Twitter
Quizlet
screenshot their final score and reach 80%
gravity is hard, scatter start with. auditory output
drill game
Teach Challenge.
1st day is Kahoot, second day is Team challange and test
embed across the curriculum
gaming toolkit for campus
what to take home: have students facing students from differnt library
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http://sched.co/69f2
Putting it all together: a holistic approach to utilizing your library’s user data for making informed web design decisions
In the age of Big Data, there is an abundance of free or cheap data sources available to libraries about their users’ behavior across the many components that make up their web presence. Data from vendors, data from Google Analytics or other third-party tracking software, and data from user testing are all things libraries have access to at little or no cost. However, just like many students can become overloaded when they do not know how to navigate the many information sources available to them, many libraries can become overloaded by the continuous stream of data pouring in from these sources. This session will aim to help librarians understand 1) what sorts of data their library already has (or easily could have) access to about how their users use their various web tools, 2) what that data can and cannot tell them, and 3) how to use the datasets they are collecting in a holistic manner to help them make design decisions. The presentation will feature examples from the presenters’ own experience of incorporating user data in decisions related to design the Bethel University Libraries’ web presence.
http://tinyurl.com/jbchapf
data tools: user testing, google analytics, click trakcer vendor data
- user testing, free, no visualization, cross-domain, easy to use, requires scripts
qualitative q/s : why people do what they do and how will users think about your content
3 versions: variables: options on book search and order/wording of the sections in the articles tab
Findings: big difference between tabs versus single-page. Lil difference btw single-page options. Take-aways it won’t tell how to fix the problem, how to be empathetic how the user is using the page
Like to do in the future: FAQ and Chat. Problem: low use. Question how to make it be used (see PPT details)
- Crazy Egg – Click Trackers. not a free tool, lowest tier, less $10/m.
see PPT for details>
interaction with the pates, clicks and scrollings
- scroll analytics
not easy to use, steep learning curve
“blob” GAnalytics recognize the three different domains that r clicked through as one.
- vendor data: springshare
chat and FAQ
Libguides
questions:
is there a dashboard tool that can combine all these tools?
optimal workshop: reframe, but it is more about qualitative data.
how long does it take to build this? about two years in general, but in the last 6 months focused.
Privacy in the Surveillance Age: How Librarians Can Fight Back.
Wednesday, December 9, 2015
2pm Eastern (11am Pacific | 12pm Mountain | 1pm Central)
Description:
In the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA and FBI dragnet surveillance, many Americans are concerned that their rights to privacy and intellectual freedom are under threat. But librarians are perfectly positioned to help our communities develop strategies to protect themselves against unwanted surveillance. In this webinar, Alison Macrina and April Glaser of the Library Freedom Project will talk about the landscape of surveillance, the work of the LFP, and some tips and tools librarians can use to resist pervasive surveillance in the digital age.
About the Presenters:
Alison Macrina is a librarian, privacy rights activist, and the founder and director of the Library Freedom Project, an initiative which aims to make real the promise of intellectual freedom in libraries by teaching librarians and their local communities about surveillance threats, privacy rights and law, and privacy-protecting technology tools to help safeguard digital freedoms. Alison is passionate about connecting surveillance issues to larger global struggles for justice, demystifying privacy and security technologies for ordinary users, and resisting an internet controlled by a handful of intelligence agencies and giant multinational corporations. When she’s not doing any of that, she’s reading.
April Glaser is a writer and an activist with the Library Freedom Project. She currently works as a mobilization specialist at Greenpeace USA, where she focuses on ending oil extraction in the Arctic. Prior to Greenpeace, April was at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, organizing around the net neutrality campaign and EFF’s grassroots programming. April also previously worked with the Prometheus Radio Project, where her efforts helped propel the passage of the Local Community Radio Act, the largest expansion of community radio in U.S. history. She lives in Oakland, California and continues to work with local organizations on a range of digital rights issues.
Can’t make it to the live show? That’s okay. The session will be recorded and available on the Carterette Series Webinars site for later viewing.
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To register for the online event
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2. Complete and submit the form.
3. A URL for the event will be emailed to you immediately after registration.
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Contact a member of the Carterette Series planning team with questions or suggestions:
More on privacy in this IMS blog:
Center for Digital Education (CDE)
real-time impact on curriculum structure, instruction delivery and student learning, permitting change and improvement. It can also provide insight into important trends that affect present and future resource needs.
Big Data: Traditionally described as high-volume, high-velocity and high-variety information.
Learning or Data Analytics: The measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs.
Educational Data Mining: The techniques, tools and research designed for automatically extracting meaning from large repositories of data generated by or related to people’s learning activities in educational settings.
Predictive Analytics: Algorithms that help analysts predict behavior or events based on data.
Predictive Modeling: The process of creating, testing and validating a model to best predict the probability of an outcome.
Data analytics, or the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data, is driving decisionmaking in many institutions. However, because of the unique nature of each district’s or college’s data needs, many are building their own solutions.
For example, in 2014 the nonprofit company inBloom, Inc., backed by $100 million from the Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, closed its doors amid controversy regarding its plan to store, clean and aggregate a range of student information for states and districts and then make the data available to district-approved third parties to develop tools and dashboards so the data could be used by classroom educators.22
Tips for Student Data Privacy
Know the Laws and Regulations
There are many regulations on the books intended to protect student privacy and safety: the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA), the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
— as well as state, district and community laws. Because technology changes so rapidly, it is unlikely laws and regulations will keep pace with new data protection needs. Establish a committee to ascertain your institution’s level of understanding of and compliance with these laws, along with additional safeguard measures.
Make a Checklist Your institution’s privacy policies should cover security, user safety, communications, social media, access, identification rules, and intrusion detection and prevention.
Include Experts
To nail down compliance and stave off liability issues, consider tapping those who protect privacy for a living, such as your school attorney, IT professionals and security assessment vendors. Let them review your campus or district technologies as well as devices brought to campus by students, staff and instructors. Finally, a review of your privacy and security policies, terms of use and contract language is a good idea.
Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
Students, staff, faculty and parents all need to know their rights and responsibilities regarding data privacy. Convey your technology plans, policies and requirements and then assess and re-communicate those throughout each year.
“Anything-as-a-Service” or “X-as-a-Service” solutions can help K-12 and higher education institutions cope with big data by offering storage, analytics capabilities and more. These include:
• Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): Providers offer cloud-based storage, similar to a campus storage area network (SAN)
• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): Opens up application platforms — as opposed to the applications themselves — so others can build their own applications
using underlying operating systems, data models and databases; pre-built application components and interfaces
• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): The hosting of applications in the cloud
• Big-Data-as-a-Service (BDaaS): Mix all the above together, upscale the amount of data involved by an enormous amount and you’ve got BDaaS
Suggestions:
Use accurate data correctly
Define goals and develop metrics
Eliminate silos, integrate data
Remember, intelligence is the goal
Maintain a robust, supportive enterprise infrastructure.
Prioritize student privacy
Develop bullet-proof data governance guidelines
Create a culture of collaboration and sharing, not compliance.
more on big data in this IMS blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/?s=big+data&submit=Search
