DIAL: Digital Integration into Arts Learning

Developing digital literacies

DIAL focuses on the development of digital literacies in Arts Higher Education with the primary goal of improved graduate employability. We expect attendant improvements in discipline development, pedagogic enhancement and improved organisational processes. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/developingdigitalliteracies/dial.aspx

The project takes a community-based approach, enabling students and staff to support each other to realise their aspirations collectively and individually.  Digital literacy in an Arts environment is of use to staff and students in other disciplines because of its explicit focus on the visual, and because of the emphasis on creativity.

The project aims to overcome three significant existing obstacles to the effective development of digital literacies:

1)Ensuring students and staff perceive the relevance of a range of digital literacies to their own professional and personal lives, so they are motivated to explore and experiment, activities which are essential to maintaining currency

2)Sustaining change cost effectively

3)Providing training and development in a context where skills and experience vary enormously within and between groups of students and staff, and where existing skills are hard to diagnose efficiently and accurately

Communities of staff and students within the larger university community will self-identify with the goals of improving their collective digital literacies over a six month period, initially with significant support from the project team.  Over the project life-time, processes, resources and toolkits will be developed so the communities can be increasingly autonomous in their development programmes. Within the community, individual and collective aims and anxieties will be identified, along with current skills and experience. Community members will collaborate to increase the overall digital literacy of the whole community.

Objectives

• Enable sixteen self-identifying communities within UAL to articulate their digital literacies goals and aspirations, assess their existing skills and confidence levels, and develop processes to support their development, including the generation of resources (for example such as digital video recordings of staff using applications which are new to them, and articulating in a voice-over their concerns and their developing understanding).
• Develop processes for developing and sustaining digital literacies throughout the institution after the end of the project.
• Strengthen existing links with employers, advisory and sector bodies, practitioners and alumni, which will facilitate enhancement of the relevance of the curriculum in the areas of digital literacies, and in other areas.
• Understand the issues and ideas associated with the fullest interpretation of digital literacies, including information literacies and techno-social practice
• Establish a collaborative development centre for digital literacies to share our findings, processes and expertise with the wider HE community and with alumni through publications, events, freely-available resources and consultancy

LINKS:

The design studio, JISC resources and suport - http://jiscdesignstudio.pbworks.com/w/page/38511966/digital%20literacy

Mash up of DIAL related and digital literacies JISC project content - http://www.scoop.it/t/developing-digital-literacies

Mai JISC project page (all projects) - http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/developingdigitalliteracies/dial.aspx

JISC CETIS, the Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards - http://jisc.cetis.ac.uk/