The Digital Gardener Initiative, through UITS Learning Technologies, is a faculty-driven initiative designed to build community, share best practices, develop successful programs, and build infrastructure to improve digital literacy, digital creativity, and digital learning at Indiana University.
Who are we?
Indiana University is a public, research intensive institution in the midwest rooted in liberal arts and sciences. A multicampus institution with a renowned business school (Kelley), Law School (Mauer at IUB; McKinney at IUPUI), School of Medicine (IUPUI and IUB), Dental and Optometry schools, IU draws students from all over the United States and has a sizable international student population. In 2021, Dr. Pamela Whitten became the 19th President of Indiana University, IU's first female President.
- Multiicampus Institute: Seven Campuses and 2 Regional Centers
- Student body: 110,000 Students University-Wide
- Academic Staff: nearly 9,000 Academic Staff University-Wide
The Situation
Transformative Job Market
- New Career Types/Tracks: 85% of all jobs available by 2030 will be new positions/careers: i.e., non-existent roles and services prior to 2020 (Institute for the Future 2017; World Economic Forum 2018)
- Landing the Position: "Soft Skills" remain top priority in hiring practices, but these are increasingly digitally inflected: digital communication, digital collaboration, digital creativity, digital problem-solving (see Petrone 2019; Marr 2022)
Responsibility in Higher Education
- Inclusivity: The digital divide is most pronounced across issues of Race, Gender, and Class. When we fail to integrate digital literacy into higher education, we create double-jeapordy digital inequity (McLay & Reyes, 2019): a process by which we unintentionally widen that gap.
- Engagement: Bringing digital literacy/digital creativity practices in the classroom has a positive impact on student engagement, performance, and retention. This is even more pronounced (nearly 2 times more) for BIPOC and first generation students (Civitas, Adobe, and UT San Antonio, 2020).
- Accountability: Over 80% of Students, Faculty, and Administrators agree/strongly agree that teaching digital literacy skills should be part of the curriculum (Chronicle of Higher Ed)
Indiana/IU Specific Exigencies
The development of digital skills, with equal investments in digital literacy and employee upskilling, are key to jump-starting Indiana state’s economic recovery (Brookings 76).
- Lacking Skills: Indiana (K-20 and adult labor force) are behind neighboring states in digital literacy (Brookings).
- Minimal Guidance: No unified plan for integrating digital literacy/digital creativity into the IU culture.
- Institutional Silos: Pockets of digital literacy across IU, but very limited cross campus / cross institution collaboration.
One Response
We brought together a group of "Grounding Gardeners" (faculty and staff from across IU) to help us think through key issues and plans. We presented a vision and set of possibilities and the group helped to prioritize particular strategies going forward.
Question/Prompts for this group of faculty and staff:
- What is digital literacy? What does it mean to be digitally literate (i.e., what is digital literacy?) What does digital literacy look like in different fields/disciplines?
- What are we already doing on our campuses? How impacting are those efforts?
- What do we need? What can we do? Where do we start?
Outcomes:
- Host a Summit
- Create a Faculty Development Program
- Build a Community
- Faculty-focused culture transformation
Leading Transformation
Our Transformation Approach: DGI@IU
The Digital Gardener Initiative is a faculty-driven, university-wide digital literacy, digital creativity, and digital learning initiative launched with support from the University Information Technology Services, Division of Learning Technologies. The initiative is designed to cultivate digital ways of knowing, doing, and making across the curriculum.
People
Who are your champions? How will they be supported? Existing structures? New funding lines/grants? Reallocation of funds?
Places
Where are your grounding points? What locations, physical or digital, enable the work? What infrastructure is in place and how it enable access (for faculty and students alike)?
Programs
What are programs exist to serve as a pathway into transforming campus culture? What avenues need to exist? Where are high traffic or high touch opportunities?
DIGITAL GARDENER INTIATIVE
DGI includes three orientations designed to foster programs committed to improving digital competencies and technological fluencies across IU as well as making an impact state-wide:
- Phase 1: Faculty Development Program (DGFF launched in 2022)
- Phase 2: Student Success Initiatives (DG Signature Series - slated to pilot fall 2023)
- Phase 3: K-12 Outreach (DG Lite Summer Program - slated to pilot summer 2024)
Promotions
Our promotion strategy leverages several of the IT Communications outputs (IT Monitor, Connected Professor, etc.) and our internal communications with Faculty Fellows utilizes Microsoft Teams. As we are also faculty-led and feature a faculty created program, we rely heavily on peer-to-peer communication: faculty sharing success in the program with their colleagues. For storytelling and more frequent types of exposure, we craft messages, posts, snippets, etc. for our social media stream, primarily LinkedIn, and are in progress of making videos for internal promotions.
Digital Gardener Faculty Fellows Program
Starting Spring 2022, we launched the Digital Gardener Faculty Fellows program. This professional development engagement features 35 faculty representing all ranks, all IU's campuses, and a wide-range of disciplines (from Dentistry to English, Art Curation to Education Leadership). The program operates around three core commitments: skill development, curriculum integration, and cultivation of community.
Faculty Fellows
- 6 required virtual events (attend at least 5),
- 10-15 optional virtual events (attend as desired),
- 1 in-person optional event each semester (attend as desired),
- produce at least one curriculum asset,
- participate in at least one cultivator group: i.e., collaborations to integrate digital literacy more broadly
- complete a professional development reflection.
- receive a small stipend for completing requirements
- have an opportunity to apply for seed/support funding for Cultivator Group Projects.
Programming
Impact
Success Stories
For our success stories today we wanted to take a kind of Adobe-adjacent approach. That is, DGI has lots of great examples of activities, assets, and assignments that feature Adobe CC as the primary output or end goal, but we want to feature stories that situate Adobe as supportive or complimentary to wider range of digital literacy practices, in both public and professional frames.
Faculty Story | Collaboration & Afrofuturism Wikipedia Editathon
Student Story | Immersive Storytelling
Mia's work was so successful that upon sharing it with the Digital Gardener Faculty Fellows it inspired a collaboration between a couple them to create a new composition course at Indiana University (W171 Projects in Digital Literacy and Composition), and one that fulfills first-year composition credit.
