1. If you want to increase digital literacy among your students, ensure that you integrate digital techniques into the academic curriculum. That goes whether the outputs produced by students are assessed or not. A standalone workshop on video-casting can work; but integrating digital stories into a module, discussing narrative forms and storytelling within the ‘academic’ content works better.[1] There are a minority of students who engage with skills-directed learning, but the majority at Warwick don’t, in my experience and that of the Arts Faculty academics I spoke to as part of this project. So while central professional services do offer support on specific software (ITS), presentation and research technologies (Library), and profiles/portfolios (SCS), this doesn’t and indeed cannot connect students’ academic work with their digital literacy without work in Departments.
2. Students need to know how to articulate their skills and learning, so at some point in a programme of study which encompasses digital literacy teaching the tutor needs to explicate what competencies their students are developing. While we know, as tutors, that many of these competencies will make out students more employable; there are pros and cons to mentioning “employability” explicitly as a motivating factor for an assignment. You know your students better than I do, so whether you highlight the employability skills which they’ve picked up before, or after students have started engaging with and demonstrating them, is best decided by each individual.
3. To an academic thinking about their own teaching: consider digital storytelling as a drop-in form of assessment. See the below for some other things to consider in connection with this. But it is worth stressing that this can be done in a low-stakes way for your students. To give three examples: you could set a short digital story as a small component of overall assessment; add a reflective portfolio assessed by more traditional means alongside the digital story; or have the best two of three assignments (one of which is a digital story) count.
4. To a Department or someone with curriculum responsibilities: consider digital storytelling as one digital form of assessment in a progression for your students. In terms of learning outcomes, a first-year project that only has a little support might lead to students “understand the main features of a digital story”; while in a final-year module which has storytelling embedded throughout could lead to students able to “communicate scholarly principles to wider audiences”. But, as will be discussed below, digital storytelling is only one part of digital literacy, not the whole thing.
5. To “the Academy”: We need support. Not tool-based support (moodle), or workshops introducing appropriate digital tools (LDC), but 1-on-1 or small group pedagogic advice and all-hands curricula design with input into the technological choices offered by Warwick, as well as the vast array of other tools out there. Robert O’Toole has provided that to the Arts Faculty in the past, the Teaching Grid occasionally do, LDC and the Academic Technology team might if they had more staff, and things like Window on Teaching and some of the sessions I’ve run as part of the Digital Humanities team offer practice sharing; but we lack what many institutions call a digital scholarship coordinator.[2]