Parts of this post come from the report Incorporating Digital Fluency at UMW.
Our report has quite an extensive Works Cited section which clearly outlines all of the resources we consulted both internal and external to UMW. Those can be useful for background and information related to digital fluency, but I want to share some resources for faculty looking to start to incorporate digital fluency into their classes.
First, we have created a series of modules around Domain of One’s Own and introductory Digital Fluency. These are made to help you to think about ways to talk about DoOO and Digital Fluency to your students and help everyone better understand the power of the web. These will continue to be updated and we are planning to add a number of new modules in the near future.
The Digital Studies faculty also have a series of introductory modules. Started by Zach Whalen and expanded as more and more faculty have taught DGST 101, the Culture modules in particular can provide resources and ideas to incorporate into your teaching, particularly around specific topics such as privacy, data collection, and algorithms.
Our colleagues at Middlebury have also been hard at work with thinking about digital fluency. They have started two initiatives in particular that may be of interest: Information Environmentalism and Digital Detox. These could provide you with a frame of references and further resources to think through and help students develop digital fluency skills. Bryn Mawr’s Digital Competencies site also has some excellent resources and suggestions on how to get started. The University of Texas Austin has a fantastic database of assignments as well.
Finally, I have to once again recommend Mike Caulfield’s excellent open textbook Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers as well as his Digital Polarization Initiative. He makes it simple to incorporate discipline specific exercises around digital fluency and information literacy into a course, as well as providing opportunities for students to help “clean up the web” so to speak. You can listen to the talk he gave last year at UMW to understand how his project grew and took shape.
Increasingly, digital fluency is becoming a core value and competency in the Digital Liberal Arts. We want to help faculty create courses that help students attain those skills needed to thrive in the 21st Century.
Photo by Ravi Pinisetti on Unsplash
