Over the last couple of days we have been meeting with the other projects in our ‘cluster’ funded by the JISC’s Developing Digital Literacies programme; Bath’s Professionalism in the Digital Environment (PriDE), Oxford Brookes’ Institutional Student ePioneer Partnerships (InStePP) and Exeter’s Cascading Research-like Digital Literacy Skills at Exeter (CASCADE).
As usual it was really useful to talk over project progress and issues. PriDE used a ‘paper wiki’ (co-authoring on flipchart paper) to get us sharing ideas and thoughts about a range of issues, under the “One thing…” title. Everyone had a chance to comment on, for instance, “One thing I wish someone had told me about the project…” and the chance to comment on other people’s contributions. For me, as a learning technologist on a Digital Literacies project, I was particularly relieved to discover it isn’t only me that still has trouble finding my way around the support wiki hosted by JISC!
InStePP is developing learning experiences, the assessment of which are endorsed by professional bodies. This is a step short of accreditation, but allows for a greater degree of tailoring of content, and thus makes for a more agile, adaptable curriculum better suited to the diversity of students and changing digital landscape. Unfortunately I don’t think we are in a position to steal this idea right now, which is a shame because I think it has a lot of merit and I am very keen to see the results from this as the project progresses.
CASCADE not only hosted the meeting (thanks for the exquisite cream tea!), but also gave us the chance to meet their ‘interns’. They have a cohort of postgraduate students who are sharing (cascading) their digital skills to undergraduates. This is an extremely strong model – the postgraduates strengthen their own understanding, are exposed to a wider variety of “use cases”, and the undergraduates benefit from the slightly wiser heads of the postgraduates. This work is set in the context of case studies, which are run by the postgrads and which your can read about on the project blog. This is a model I would very much like to see replicated here as soon as possible.
Hello Pat, thanks for the positive feedback. We think our interns provide an excellent model for cascading digital literacies too. We’ve also blogged about the cream tea meeting – and what we like best about the Digitally Ready project! – over here: http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/cascade/blog/2012/04/23/cream-tea-and-clusters/. And we nicked your photo, since we’d been too busy putting cream on to take any pictures. Is that allowed??