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Empowering Faculty & Students Through Digital Literacy: Lowering Barrier to Success Justin Hodgson | Indiana University

Framing Considerations

Transformative Job Market

  • New Career Types/Tracks: 85% of all jobs available by 2030 will be positions/careers non-existent prior to 2020 (Institute for the Future 2017; World Economic Forum 2018)
  • Landing the Position: "Soft Skills" remain top priority in hiring practices, but these are increasingly digitally inflected: digital communication, digital collaboration, digital creativity, digital problem-solving (see Petrone 2019; Marr 2022)

Responsibility in Education

  • Inclusivity: The digital divide is most pronounced across issues of Race, Gender, and Class. When we fail to integrate digital literacy into higher education, we create double-jeapordy digital inequity (McLay & Reyes, 2019): a process by which we unintentionally widen that gap.
  • Engagement: Bringing digital literacy/digital creativity practices in the classroom has a positive impact on student engagement, performance, and retention. This is even more pronounced (nearly 2 times more) for BIPOC and first generation students (Civitas, Adobe, and UT San Antonio, 2020).
  • Accountability: In a recent survey, over 80% of Students, Faculty, and Administrators agree/strongly agree that teaching digital literacy skills should be part of the curriculum (Chronicle of Higher Ed)

A Simple but Transformative Experience

My Digital Educator's journey begins with using video transitions to teach transitions in writing for students in Basic & Developmental Writing courses (~ Spring 2003)

Challenge:

  • Choose 5 images (found online or personal images) that represent something meaningful to you
  • Record yourself (voice recording) telling us your story through those five images
  • Put those images in sequential order in Windows Movie Maker
  • Add video transition between the images to help convey your narrative.

Why DL Matters

  • When we give students the opportunity to learn digital literacy skills and new media authoring practices, we quite literally expand their capacities for expression. This helps students not only to tell better stories but, more importantly, take on greater (or different) degrees of agency.
  • When we invite students to create with digital technologies, we give them access to course content, ideas, and practices in new ways. This is not only a matter of what they might make (i.e., a podcast), but fundamentally how they might engage a given course’s content.
  • When working in and across digital modalities, students can have meaningful success outside traditional modes of academic discourse. This is especially important for DEI efforts, including 1st gen, non-traditional, and international students, for many of whom traditional academic discourse can be a major hurdle if not insurmountable barrier.
  • When creating digital "things," students actively want to share their work. There is a built-in public-facing condition when making digital things, and many of us, students and faculty alike, see and feel the reality of a persistent digital audience, that underlying ‘meant to be seen’ condition as when we are engaged in digital making.

Success Outside Traditional Academic Discourse

Tanya Patel's "10 and 2, Are You?" Interactive Image Project

Created using Adobe Photoshop and wix.com

Tianqi Cai's "Winter in My Community" Video Essay

Visit Project Here

created using Adobe Premiere Pro

Accessing Ideas in New Ways

Mia Freeman's "History of Vaccines" Digital Monument

Project created using Minecraft EDU & Adobe CC Express

Video walkthrough created using Adobe Premiere Rush

Full Project & Learning Reflection Express Page by Mia Freeman

Expanding Capacities of Expression

Andrew William's "Picture Perfect" - A Remix Video

This video was a remix of Kat Napiorkowska's "Living with Depression"

William's remix was published in the Journal for Undergraduate Multimedia Projects jumpplus.net

Remix project (re)created using Adobe Premiere Pro

A Couple Reorientations

Myth of Expertise (and the Digital Native)

  1. Technologies change rapidly so even "digitally inclined" faculty are always playing catch-up with industry.
  2. The so-called "Digital Natives" that Mark Prensky wrote about in the early 2000s are now faculty who regularly struggle to make Zoom work correctly. "Can you see my screen?" ... "You're on mute."
  3. The expert-to-student model works, of course, but there are advantages to embracing student directed learning approaches (self-learning and peer-to-peer models): i.e., this helps students form habits of practice for working in creativity technologies and learning how to learn new technologies.
  4. For most instructors, the necessary 'expertise' resides elsewhere. As a writing teacher, you do not need to be an expert in video editing to recognize whether the rhetorical elements of a video are sound. Your focus is on providing guidance on the acceptable modes and means of representing knowledge, communicating ideas coherently and with impact, and on situating those expressions in ways that meet particular audience needs (whether they be rooted disciplinary oriented ways of knowing or more general appeals to pathos).

Pedagogy & Practice

When bringing digital literacy and digital creativity into the classroom, it is important to remember that the technologies are not the focus (i.e., it is not tech for tech's sake). Rather, we must remain people oriented, pedagogy focused, and purpose driven.

  • What technologies are available to students?
  • What kind of writing activities (from ideation to full on assignments) can students do with those technologies?
  • Are there clear pedagogical values with this approach that align with course goals and student learning outcomes?
  • What considerations are there for matters of access and accessibility?
  • What kind of instruction will they need?
  • What is your role: Expert? Coach? Co-Learner? Other?
  • Are there existing resources to help orient students to the technology / assignment?

Lowering Barriers to Success

Digital Literacy / Digital Creativity Option

If integrating digital literacy and digital creativity offers students a new way to engage course content, let's them expand their capacities of expression, and let's them find success outside traditional academic discourse, then the first way to lower barriers to student success is by taking an existing assignment and offer a digital literacy/digital creativity kind of option.

Platform Swap

Give students the option to switch from a traditional written paper in Microsoft Word to Google Docs to a multimedia authoring platform like Adobe Express webpage. Switching to a new platform with a greater imposition on design and multiple media will invite, by default, students to start to work in and across a wider range of media considerations.

Transmediation

Take an existing assignment and require it be completed in an altogether new medium. For example, you might take a reading response and have students create a video or take an existing quiz and have students create a poster or infographic detailing a key concept or principle. The goal is to rethink how we invite application, allowing students to demonstrate comprehension and mastery in new ways.

SSS Example | Caulin McGraw

(In-Class) Activities

Bringing digital literacy/digital creativity into the classroom can create a more engaging learning experience for students, helping them not only to be more involved and have more fun, but to start to accumulate positive experiences with discipline-specific identities and practices. These can also offer a way to scaffold the learning and development of students digital skills.

Think-Pair-Make-Share

Think-Pair-Share is a popular Active Learning strategy used in classrooms. The modified version, Think-Pair-Make-Share, brings Digital Literacy and Active Learning together, adding "making" (and reflection/explanation) as a key component. This allows instructors to use what students make as a means to facilitate engagement.

  • 1 minute: Write down a response to a prompt.
  • 2 minutes: Pair up (or group up) and discuss your responses. Select one key takeaway.
  • 5-7 minutes: As a pair/group, create an image (using Adobe Express) that conveys that takeaway.
  • Share image creation with instructor/class; be prepared to explain both the creation and to expound on the takeaway.
Example Prompt & Creations (Digital Gardener Faculty Fellows Program): What is Digital Literacy? What does it look like in your Discipline?
Think-Pair-Make-Share Activity

Social Media as Model

This activity invites students to "social media making" as a way of knowing/developing understanding. For example, instructors might have students create a TikTok video or an Instagram post that conveys a practice, concept, or structure related to class.

Example Prompt: Pumpkin Challenge in ENG-W171

Welcome to the pumpkin patch / Minecraft EDU / TikTok challenge! Today we are practicing drafting, building, documenting, and discussing our work.

  • Draft: On a piece of paper, plan how you're going to build the pumpkins in Minecraft EDU at different scales (e.g., one that fits in 6x6x6 area; another in a 15x15x15 area). Think about how to represent rounded shapes in a cube form!
  • Build: Using the fill command, fill a cube of your desired dimensions with your chosen material. Then "carve" your pumpkin by removing blocks. Do this for both pumpkins.
  • Decorate: Decorate your pumpkins and pumpkin patch. Bonus: create Jack O' Lanterns!
  • Document: Create a TikTok video introducing your build and build process to an audience of freshmen students at IUB.
  • Submit: You should submit an mp4 file or a link to a TikTok. You are not required to publish this video if you do not feel comfortable.mit
  • TIPs & TRYs: Use voice-over, sync to music, incorporate transitions, participate in popular trends, etc. Get creative! This will service as your soft launch into the next unit on video/podcasting.
Gemma Huck | Student Example

Creating Instructional Resources

Another way to lower barriers to success is to create engaging and informative instructional assets that help students access course material and/or learn course-relevant skills outside of class and/or at their own pace.

Embracing & Empowering Failure

Embracing 3 Failures: Fun Failure, Fast Failure, Formative Failure

You don't have to be an expert and you don't have to be perfect. All you really need is a willingness to fail and to share that journey with students. It can actually help in easing student anxiety about working across platforms and media. In my classes, I embrace a couple different approaches that help reorient how we think about failure.

  • Fast failure is designed to get the "bad" (or less than ideal) ideas out of the way and to do so quickly. What matters here is not whether a student comes up with the right idea for a project or solution, or even the best explanation or approach, but rather a quick (low-risk) engagement to (1) get ideas into the conversation and (2) to filter out the ideas likely to bear less fruit so as to better focus energy/time.
  • Fun failure focuses on celebrating one another's innocent and incidental mishaps and miscues (technological, conceptual, or other): e.g., I often invite students to use the last or first 5 minutes of class to share their "fun failures." I openly share my own (especially those of a technological variety). These stories, artifacts, and shared experiences become part of the course culture (and sometimes evolve into course memes).
  • Formative failure is another name for drafting, iterability, or review (peer review as well as pre-grade instructor review). As we know, most writing or making activities go through multiple 'final' versions before being done, publishable, etc. So rather than focus on failure as a shortcoming, treat this as iterative: as a series of formative failures that shape the work / ideas toward a better end.

Empowering Failure: Course Tokens

Tokens are a course design feature that can help lower student anxiety about course work and foster a climate committed to taking intellectual risks. They function as a form of currency (given and earned) that can be exchanged for a number of uses.

  • In my courses, students start with 2 tokens and have the opportunity to earn 3-5 more based on specific course-related challenges.

Course Token Usage

  • 72-hour Extension - Students can use a token for a "no questions asked" guaranteed 72 hour extension (excluding final course projects).
  • Revise & Resubmit: Students can use a token to revise and resubmit any course assignment for an improved letter grade.
  • Excused Absence: Students can use a token to offset an otherwise unexcused absence.
  • 1% Final Grade bump: Students can use a token to receive a 1% grade final grade increase (only one token can be used in this manner).
  • Collaborators' Pass: Students can use a token to turn any assignment into a collaborative project (each student involved must spend a token).

New Course Models | Digital Literacy + Active Learning (e.g., ENG-W171@IU)

This new course in the IU curriculum was co-created by Justin Hodgson and Miranda Rodak (IU Bloomington). W171 fulfills the First Year Writing Gen Ed requirement at IU, brings together active learning and digital literacy, and features a mentor / apprentice co-instructional model.

ENG-W171 | Projects in Digital Literacy & Composition

Digital Literacy, Generative AI, & the Transformation of Higher Education

The futures we imagine impact the decisions we make today
  • Nearly all learning activities are or will be digitally mediated.
  • The integration of Generative AI into writing platforms (among other technologies) will shift the core practices we value and assess across higher education.
  • The human-technology collaboration at the core of Generative AI will necessitate an increasing orientation toward play (i.e., a willingness-to-play) as a basis for writing, creativity, and learning.
  • Digital literacy and digital creativity is not only a potential response to the challenges of Generative AI (i.e., making creative projects instead of writing papers), but is also a way to further empower students and their ability to leverage Generative AI.

Thank You!

Connect with me on LinkedIn
justinhodgson.com

Additional Example Projects

Multimedia Essays

Journal/Magazine Articles: Research-based Writing

Image Engagements: Infographics/Composites/Posters

Audio/Podcast Engagements

Video Engagements

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