Creative adaptations of an openly licensed course – 23 Things for Digital Knowledge [A-133] Home : ALT Annual Conference 2019

Public Group active 1 day, 3 hours ago

Tue, Sep 3 2019, 11:30am – 12:30pm

Authors: Stephanie (Charlie) Farley, and R. John Robertson

Room: Room 2.07

Theme: Creativity across the curriculum

Type: Research/practice (20mins)

Description

Session Description

Since its launch in 2016 the award-winning online course 23 Things for Digital Knowledge has been utilised, adapted, and re-packaged within the University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh Award for Digital Content Creation, & Centre for Open Learning Access) by local authorities (Scottish Social Services Council, & NHS Lothian), and by international educators (Sweden’s Skåne regional libraries, Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University, Germany). This session will present how the online course has been used to creatively engage a variety of learners with digital skills and literacies, and has been adapted, supplemented, and embedded into curriculum and learning across the globe by one of the international educators now using it in their university.

23 Things for Digital Knowledge was created to provide development of the “21st-century digital skills…needed to participate in the knowledge-based workforce and to put employees in charge of their own learning”(Laar, 2017). Its course structure was inspired by the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburgh County’s 23 Things (2006) and designed towards flexible learning options to be accessible, self-paced, and highly adaptable.

Incorporating the JISC Digital Capability Framework (2015), the course scaffolds key concepts in order to develop an understanding of digital literacy and skills by:
Addressing key concepts of diversity, accessibility, security, and footprints in digital environments.
Actively exploring digital tools and applications.
Embedding guided blogging activities encouraging reflection and examination of tools both familiar and unfamiliar through the lens of these concepts.
Incorporating aspects of playful learning into the content and activities to boost learner retention and engagement.
One of the course organisers of ‘Digital Literacy and Life’ (INF 3100) at Seattle Pacific University, will present on why they chose to incorporate 23 Things for Digital Knowledge into their own course which looked at “the digital dimension of personal, professional, and spiritual lives in the digital age and introduce[d] strategies for cultivating identity and agency in networked environments”. How, driven by a commitment that understanding digital literacy is experiential and not merely theoretical they incorporated 23 Things into each of the 10 weeks of the course, choosing to adopt and adapt instead of creating their own version both to save time and create, in a small way, a cross-cultural experience for their students.
In the session participants will explore these adaptive uses of 23 Things for Digital Knowledge and consider both principles for building open materials to be usable in different contexts as well as your own and principles for adopting and adapting someone else’s materials for your context (including how to build them into a more formal course structure). We’ll share lessons learned and feedback from students.

References

23 Things for Digital Knowledge. [online] Available at: http://www.23things.ed.ac.uk/ [Accessed 12/03/2019]

JISC Digital Capability Framework. [online] Available at: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/rd/projects/building-digital-capability [Accessed 12/03/2019]

Laar, E., et. al. (2017). ‘The relation between 21st-century skills and digital skills: A systematic literature review’, Computers in Human Behavior, Vol. 72, p 577-588. [online] Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2017.03.010 [Accessed 12/03/2019]

Paulus, M., (2018) Information Studies: Exploring the intersection of information, technology, and faith in Seattle, [online] Available at: https://scholars.spu.edu/infostudies/courses/ [Accessed 12/03/2019]

Scottish Social Services Council, ‘23 Digital capabilities to support practice and learning in social and health services’,[online] Available at: http://23digital.sssc.uk.com/ [Accessed 12/03/2019]

The Learning 2.0 Project – 23 Things, (2006) Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg (PLMC) County, USA. [online] Available at: https://plcmcl2-about.blogspot.co.uk/ [Accessed 12/03/2019]

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