Communication cannot be boiled down to writing text, I think it is fair to say. This obvious statement has been amplified and given urgency by recent (and not-so-recent) technological change. If you want to communicate effectively, now, you need to know how to handle digital media. As a result, the vast majority of jobs now require digital skills; this EU report says 90% of professional careers do so, and that sounds reasonable on the face of it.[1] This has not been widely addressed, partly because of the myth of the “digital native” implying that digital literacy is in-built among our current cohorts of students – a range of studies have comprehensively, to my mind, rubbished this (e.g. Bonds 2014) –[2] students may be digital natives in the sense of inhabiting the world of social media and being able to “find things out” through google; but they do not have a range of digital literacy skills or know how to evaluate the information they find critically. There’s a range of literature showing that digital literacy learning and teaching at university lags its importance in the wider world; the ability to search for and find good information, and the knowledge to know what makes this information good is key in our age of information overload (Greene/Yu/Copeland 2014).[3]

Murray and Perez, 2014,[4] reflects on the lack of structure in teaching digital literacy across Canada, the US, much of Europe and the UK – certainly accurate when extended to Warwick in my experience. Murray calls for digital literacy to be “assessed, remediated and amplified” at a university level, rather than these important skills being just taken for granted or assumed to be adequate. Burniske 2008 calls for teachers to incorporate digital literacy into their classes to aid their students’ learning and engagement with issues such as content analysis and perspective, as well as looking at the usefulness and validity of information on the internet; using the curriculum was a “way in” to media literacy, civil literacy, engagements with different types of online discourse and community, and other vital skills for the twenty-first century. Best summary of the literature around the literacies and their importance is found through the Handbook of Research on New Literacies 2014.[5]

Yet, final assessment in the Arts Faculty at Warwick, as at many other universities, is predominantly based upon written examinations and text-based essays of over 2000 words. Standard models for formative work involve a ‘short form’ essay… somewhere in the region of 1500-2000 words. The disparity between the literacies required to communicate effectively (and, some would argue, be) in the outside world, and what we ask students to do at University, is stark.

For the purpose of this piece of work, I chose to use digital storytelling – as a mode which I felt could be adopted more widely than in my own practice at Warwick in a relatively short term. Asking students to produce short videos consisting of images with a voice-over narration, is one relatively light-touch way in which students can be asked, as part of their university work, to produce outputs in different media – I went along with a few other places in calling this Digital Storytelling.[6]

Setting a strict time limit (e.g. 3 minutes) tests how well students can summarize information and get to the core of an argument, or use a specific example to illustrate a wider theme (moving from small to big), or tell a short ‘story’ in the more traditional sense of the word. Involving images, audio, and potentially video and music makes students think about the interplay between content and media. With software like WeVideo, this can be a low-barrier activity needing only a browser (as opposed to utilising, for example, iMovie, with its specific hardware requirements).

For Classics, after discussion with me and funding from IATL, Clare Rowan organised an external agency, Netskills, to provide a training workshop (recording here), and is now providing short videos on youtube (here and here); for History and Hispanic Studies I provided some training myself in 1.5 hour workshops with approximately 20-30 students (slides from Hispanic Studies here). Ive embedded an example of the work produced in the Classics department below, others are available online, here and here; I didn’t get permission to share work by either History of Hispanic Studies.

It is important to stress that this is not new, there are plenty of institutions which use technology far more comprehensively in their assessment than we do at Warwick. Nor are the techniques I’m using entirely new for Warwick, although the stress on providing replicable solutions that can be incorporated into modules without extensive one-on-one support or the possession by the academic of advanced technical skills, is new here. All of this will take multiple years to embed.