A 2016 Pew Research Center study indicates that the digital divide in the United States is not solely about access to technology; it also is about the ability to use technology to get what we need.1 What does digital readiness mean; applying cumulative knowledge to real-world situations. Having a tech or STEM-related degree does not ensure digital readiness.
How Can We Encourage Digital Agility in the Liberal Arts?
Digital pedagogy often creates opportunities for instructors to create non-disposable assignments—assignments that are not designed to be thrown away but rather have a purpose past being required.3
“We need to marry the best of our academic work with the best of edtech. In other words, what would it look like if education technology were embedded in the everyday practice of academic disciplines?”4
Project-based learning fits well within the curricular flexibility of the liberal arts. In project-based work, students apply what they are learning in the context of an engaging experience.
Building off frameworks that are already in place, like the Association for College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy,
External-facing work offers students real situations where, if we imagine what digital agility looks like, they have to adjust to possible new digital environments and approaches.
Reflection provides a way for meaning-making to happen across individual assignments, projects, and classes. Without the chance to assemble assignments into a larger narrative, each experience lives in its own void.
How Can Institutions Build Systems-Level Support?
Liberal arts colleges in particular are interested in the ways they prepare graduates to be agile and critical in a digital world—as seen in the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE) Rubrics.
he Bryn Mawr Digital Competencies Framework5 was followed by more formal conversations and the formation of a working group (including Carleton College,
Thursday, February 13, 2020 1:00 pm
Central Standard Time (Chicago, GMT-06:00) Change time zone
Duration:
1 hour
Description:
The seventh edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association streamlines the process of creating references in APA Style. It is now easier and more straightforward to create references for all works and to accurately and consistently attribute sources. Join members of the APA Style team as they provide an in-depth look at the simplified reference system by describing the rationale behind it, how to format references using it, and the ways in which references are easier to create because of it. The webinar will then answer one of the most frequently asked Style questions: how to cite a work found online. The APA Style experts will use real-life examples to walk through the process of creating references for a variety of common webpages and websites, including ones with missing or hard-to-locate information, found via a database, and needing electronic source information (DOIs, URLs, and retrieval dates).
Researchers’ Work from University of Auckland Focuses on Communication Research (Translators as Adaptive Experts in a Flat World: From Globalization 1.0 to Globalization 4.0?).(Report). (2016). Science Letter, 1169.
An analysis shows that information flow between individuals in a social network can be ‘gerrymandered’ to skew perceptions of how others in the community will vote — which can alter the outcomes of elections.
The Internet has erased geographical barriers and allowed people across the globe to interact in real time around their common interests. But social media is starting to compete with, or even replace, nationally visible conversations in print and on broadcast media with ad libitum, personalized discourse on virtual social networks3. Instead of broadening their spheres of association, people gravitate towards interactions with ideologically aligned content and similarly minded individuals.
n information gerrymandering, the way in which voters are concentrated into districts is not what matters; rather, it is the way in which the connections between them are arranged (Fig. 1). Nevertheless, like geographical gerrymandering, information gerrymandering threatens ideas about proportional representation in a democracy.
Figure 1 | Social-network structure affects voters’ perceptions. In these social networks, ten individuals favour orange and eight favour blue. Each individual has four reciprocal social connections. a, In this random network, eight individuals correctly infer from their contacts’ preferences that orange is more popular, eight infer a draw and only two incorrectly infer that blue is more popular. b, When individuals largely interact with like-minded individuals, filter bubbles arise in which all individuals believe that their party is the most popular. Voting gridlock is more likely in such situations, because no one recognizes a need to compromise. c, Stewart et al.1 describe ‘information gerrymandering’, in which the network structure skews voters’ perceptions about others’ preferences. Here, two-thirds of voters mistakenly infer that blue is more popular. This is because blue proponents strategically influence a small number of orange-preferring individuals, whereas orange proponents squander their influence on like-minded individuals who have exclusively orane-preferring contacts, or on blue-preferring individuals who have enough blue-preferring contacts to remain unswayed.
This phenomenon, known as the “illusory truth effect”, is exploited by politicians and advertisers — and if you think you are immune to it, you’re probably wrong. In fact, earlier this year we reported on a study that found people are prone to the effect regardless of their particular cognitive profile.
A study in Cognition has found that using our own knowledge to fact-check a false claim can prevent us from believing it is true when it is later repeated. But we might need a bit of a nudge to get there.
The researchers found that participants who had focussed on how interesting the statements were in the first part of the study showed the illusory truth effect
