Posted by Catie Peiper on May 16, 2016

Digital Technology Is Changing the Career Landscape

1. People are living longer.
2. Technology can now augment and extend our own abilities.
3. Daily life is now computational as innovations in sensors and processing make our world a programmable system.
4. Our new media ecology and advances in communications systems require media literacies beyond text.
5. Social technologies are driving new forms of production and value creation.
6. Our world is now globally connected, highlighting diversity and adaptability.

Digital Literacy Is a Professional Competency

Smart Classrooms = Smart Workers

ten, technology-oriented strengths as “must haves” for future employers:

1. An ability to determine deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed via all mediums.
2. An ability to connect with others in a meaningful and direct way via modern technologies and our global networks.
3. A proficiency in problem-solving and critical analysis, especially when working with digital relationships or data.
4. An ability to adapt to different cultural settings and modalities, necessitated by our global media ecosystem.
5. An ability to translate specific information and data into abstracts while understanding the underlying reasoning.
6. An ability to critically assess and develop content that uses evolving digital media, leveraging these tools for direct and persuasive communication.
7. A transdisciplinary, multimedia mindset that eschews specialized or localized intelligences.
8. A design or goal-oriented mindset that employs systems thinking and that develops tasks and work processes towards a desired outcome.
9. An ability to discriminate and filter both digital and analog information for importance, while maximizing cognitive and productivity efficiencies.
10. 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.