Who We Are
Indiana University is a public, research intensive institution in the midwest rooted in liberal arts and sciences. A multicampus institution with a renowned business school (Kelley), Law School (Mauer at IUB; McKinney at IUPUI), School of Medicine (IUPUI and IUB), Dental and Optometry schools, IU draws students from all over the United States and has a sizable international student population. In 2021, Dr. Pamela Whitten became the 19th President of Indiana University, IU's first female President.
- Multiicampus Institute: Seven Campuses and 2 Regional Centers
- Student body: 110,000 Students University-Wide
- Academic Staff: nearly 9,000 Academic Staff University-Wide
The IU/Adobe Journey
The Problem(s)
- No unified plan for integrating digital literacy/digital creativity into the IU culture.
- Indiana (K-20 and adult labor force) was lagging behind neighboring states in digital literacy (Brookings).
- Institutional Silos: pockets of digital literacy, but limited cross campus / cross institution collaboration
The development of digital skills, with equal investments in digital literacy and employee upskilling, were key to jump-starting Indiana state’s economic recovery (Brookings 76).
Our Transformation Approach: DGI@IU
The Digital Gardener Initiative is a faculty-driven, university-wide digital literacy, digital creativity, and digital learning initiative launched with support from the University Information Technology Services, Division of Learning Technologies. The initiative is designed to cultivate digital ways of knowing, doing, and making across the curriculum.
Our People (2020)
Who are your champions? How will they be supported? Existing structures? New funding lines/grants? Reallocation of funds?
Our Places
Where are your grounding points? What locations, physical or digital, enable the work? What infrastructure is in place and how it enable access (for faculty and students alike)?
As we were creating programs that worked across multiple institutions and locations, we didn't ground our work in any specific physical locale, but rather linked to multiple grounding points distributed across our campuses.
Our Programs
What programs exist to serve as a pathway into transforming campus culture? What avenues need to exist? Where are high traffic or high touch opportunities?
DIGITAL GARDENER INTIATIVE
DGI includes four phases focused in three areas designed to establish programs that are committed to improving digital competencies and technological fluencies across IU as well as making an impact state-wide:
- Phase 1: Faculty Development Program (DGFF launched in Spring 2022)
- Phase 2: Impact beyond IU (Expand DGFF; create Digital Gardener Summit Institute)
- GEN AI UPDATE - In response to GenAI, we create the DGI AI/GenAI Series (more below)
- Phase 3: Student Success Initiatives (DG Signature Series)
- Phase 4: Build K-12 Outreach Programming (DG Lite Summer Program)
Our Promotions
How will you promote your programs, your investments in digital literacy/digital creativity? How will you raise awareness among faculty and students to ensure they know not only what tools/platforms are available, but also what opportunities exist to help them develop the requisite abilities to leverage the power of these technologies?
Our promotion strategy leverages a website and several of internal and external IT Communications outputs (IT Monitor, Connected Professor, etc.), as well as direct communications with Faculty Fellows (leveraging Microsoft Teams). Being a faculty created and faculty-led program for faculty, we rely heavily on peer-to-peer communication: i.e., faculty sharing success in the program with their colleagues. But for more frequent and expansive types of exposure we craft messages, posts, snippets, etc. for our social media stream, primarily LinkedIn, where we engage in more of the storytelling type practices: providing testimonials, success narratives, creative examples, and the like.
DG Faculty Fellows Program
Starting Spring 2022, we launched the Digital Gardener Faculty Fellows program. This professional development engagement features 35 faculty representing all ranks, all IU's campuses, and a wide-range of disciplines (from Dentistry to English, Art Curation to Education Leadership). The program operates around three core commitments: skill development, curriculum integration, and cultivation of community.
Faculty Fellows
- 7 required virtual events (attend at least 5),
- 7-10 optional virtual events (attend as desired),
- 1 in-person optional event each year (DG Summit) (attend as desired),
- produce at least one curriculum asset,
- participate in at least one cultivator group: i.e., collaborations to integrate digital literacy more broadly
- complete a professional development reflection.
- receive a small stipend for completing requirements
- have an opportunity to apply for seed funding for Cultivator Group Projects.
Programming
Impact
Exposure through Play | We use creative play as a starting point to demystify the tools and counter the growing culture of fear around.
Embracing an Ethics of Practice | We provide guidance on Policy vs. Practice issues, with a specific emphasis on practice and consideration of disclosure vs. non-disclosure in the use of these tools.
Empowering Pedagogy | We have just started this turn, challenging faculty to learn to integrate generative AI into their teaching workflows, to help them build meaningful learning experiences, and to creating opportunities for students to learn how to use these platforms ethically and effectively in discipline-specific ways
Example GenAI Approach
Success Stories
For our success stories today we wanted to take a kind of Adobe-adjacent approach. That is, DGI has lots of great examples of activities, assets, and assignments that feature Adobe CC as the primary output or end goal, but we want to feature stories that situate Adobe as supportive or complimentary to wider range of digital literacy practices, in both public and professional frames.
Faculty Success Story | Collaboration & Afrofuturism Wikipedia Editathon
Working in conjunction with other Digital Gardeners, Gemmicka Piper built the instructional assets to support a wikipedia editathon specifically for Afrofuturism content on Wikipedia.
Student Success Story | Immersive Storytelling (Minecraft EDU + Adobe)
In a Digital Monuments class taught be DGI Co-Creator Justin Hodgson, Mia Freeman created in Minecraft a digital monument to the history of vaccines. This world had embedded content and Mia went on to create a video and express page to guide viewers/readers through her creative experience.
Promotion Success Story | Promotion & Review
Miranda Rodak used several Adobe tools to prepare her promotion materials for Clinical Associate Professor. Below are three examples from the fuller range of materials submitted in her promotion dossier.
Collaborative Success Story | Projects in Digital Literacy & Composition (ENG-W171)
This new course in the IU curriculum was co-created by Justin Hodgson and DGFF Miranda Rodak (IU Bloomington) -- a course design inspired by Mia Freeman's success in ENG-R209. This new course at IU fulfills the First Year Writing Gen Ed requirement, brings together active learning and digital literacy, and features a mentor / apprentice co-instructional model. For more information, click the button below.
Digital Innovation at a Programmatic Scale
The VR Speech Lab at IU Indianapolis, created by Digital Gardener Steven Overbey, uses virtual reality technologies to allow students to practice in front of an audience.
- Students start in the consultation room, where student mentors help them brainstorm a topic, write their outlines, and organize their thoughts.
- Next they head into the new VR Speech Lab, with the headsets, to practice their presentation in a simulated environment (student VR specialists are on hand to help).
- Students can also opt to use the recording and teleprompter room feature to create a final product for wider sharing / inclusion in their e-portfolios.