Group Admins
Description
Session Description
Creativity in the 21st century is heavily reliant on the mastery of a range of digital skills for finding, evaluating, synthesising, creating and communicating digital information and artefacts. As educators, the onus is on us to develop student confidence and skills for engaging in such digital practices on which creativity relies. But how can we go about thinking through the optimal approach for integrating the development of such skills into our curriculum?
This facilitated session will offer a hands-on and practical opportunity for participants to engage in student journey planning for the development of digital skills. The session will focus on a technique of mapping out a student journey using a sticky wall – a large piece of cloth covered in spray-mount which allows users to interactively add, cluster, move and sequence a set of cards representing the stages of development of digital skills. We will provide a set of cards which articulate a set of important digital skills for students to master, and collaboratively agree the best scaffolded approach for developing these skills.
At the end of the session we will review the technique and collaboratively reflect on how participants could introduce it to their own practice.
The session links to the conference theme of “Creativity across the curriculum” due to its emphasis on the underpinning digital skills required for effective creative practices in the digital age.
Session content
Part 1: Introduction to curriculum planning at the OU and the use of the sticky wall technique (5 min)
We introduce the scenario for the activity as the development of a 4-week MOOC for the development of digital skills.
Part 2: Skills provision (10 mins)
We provide participants with a set of skills cards which are placed on the sticky wall for participants to review and clarify any questions in relation to these
Part 3: Skills clustering (15 mins)
We ask participants to suggest which of the skills go together because they are most similar. Once the skills have been grouped, we quickly identify a label for each cluster and remove the individual skills cards.
Part 4: Skills sequencing (20 mins)
We place the skills cluster labels from top to bottom on the sticky wall and the week numbers (timeline) from left to right. Then we start to sequence the development of each skill across the four weeks, for each week identifying what students should be able to do in relation to that skill at the end of that week.
Part 5: Reflection (10 mins)
We ask participants to reflect on how they might use a planning approach like the one we’ve just gone through in their own practice.
References
Beetham, H. & Sharpe, R. (2007). Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age: Designing and Delivering eLearning. NY: Routledge.
Stanfield, B. (2002). The Workshop Book: From Individual Creativity to Group Action. Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers.
The Open University (2018). Digital and Information Literacy Framework. Available from: https://www.open.ac.uk/libraryservices/pages/dilframework/ [Last accessed 13/03/2019)]
