The Digitally Ready team recently invited staff and students to a workshop to explore and reflect on their own digital literacies, using a pyramid model developed by Beetham and Sharpe (2008). We asked people to feedback from their groups and their own personal reflections about access to facilities, their digital skills or lack of them, what they do and don’t do in practice.
Emerging trends suggest that although basic needs are robustly fulfilled – hardware, software and a good network – the overriding message is that most people feel they do not have adequate time to develop and discover how new technologies can be useful and relevant to them. Some people seem unaware of what is currently available and where they can go for help. It was suggested that colleagues who share best practice provide a powerful trigger for others to invest time in personal development.
Finally, we asked people to complete ‘To become more digitally ready I will …’. The collected answers resulted in this word cloud:
To become more digitally ready I will…
What would you like to explore to become more digitally ready?
1) Time saving applications that actually save time
2) How to poll for meeting dates via Outlook
In addition to having enough time to develop capacity, I think it’s also important to demonstrate the relevance of particular technologies – so a bank of good practice examples plus hands-on, expert-led training sessions that focus on working up relevant ideas would be really useful. Plus (dare I say!) evidence of effectiveness…