Impactful Teaching and Learning Practices Incorporating Digital Literacy Assignments

Impactful Teaching and Learning Practices Incorporating Digital Literacy Assignments Art & Science of Data 2022

A minority majority, Carnegie Very High Research, Hispanic Serving Institution

UNM has always been an adobe creative campus

Land of Enchantment

New Mexico has long been home to artists of all kinds, creatives, dreamers, healers, scientists and inventors. Multiple traditions of art and storytelling weave their way through landscape and memory and fuse with emerging technologies and scientific breakthroughs to create the culture, creative works, innovation, and possibilities for a diverse future. It is a legacy that originates with the land, the light, and the diverse peoples that make this the Land of Enchantment. From artistic and cultural creativity to technical innovations, the lasting impacts of New Mexico’s contributions are impossible to completely enumerate. These ingredients that make New Mexico unique are also inspiring a new generation of leaders, creators, innovators, artists, dancers, musicians, writers, scientists, and scholars.

Digital literacy is the ability to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, create, and communicate information, requiring both cognitive and technical skills. -American Library Association

Chemical and Biological Engineering: "Digital storytelling, professional portfolios and other media creations to enhance the transfer of engineering skills to the workplace."

Creativity is critical for informed citizenry and educated workforce

World Economic Forum predicts creative and digital literacy skills among the top ten required in the workforce in 2025.
Bloomberg reports creative problem solving, communication, strategic thinking are most desired but hardest to find skills.
The Economist predicts creative thinking and problem solving will be the #1 most valued skills for future workplaces.
LinkedIn reveals that creativity ranks as #1 most in-demand workforce skill in 2019 and 2020.
Adobe found employers seek communication and creativity in 2 million job postings, yet 75% of resumes do not list them as a skill.

Launched at UNM in May, 2019

UNM IT Mission

UNM IT will partner strategically with the community of New Mexico’s Flagship University to enable success without boundaries through innovative technologies and services aligned with its educational, research and service missions.

It starts with partnership and is about more than software

http://creativecampus.unm.edu

Creative Commons opening Wednesday, January 26 3PM-5PM

Amaris Ketcham, Honors Faculty: "Each year I teach set of courses where the students use InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator to create a literary magazine named Scribendi"

Educating for a rapidly changing world

Text, raw data, graphs, analytical skills matter...

As do these tools...

...But in a world of short attention spans, access to unlimited data, and increasing automation, communication, creativity and empathy are the skills / qualities that are in demand.

History: "Cartographic design with illustrator, posters with photoshop, pamphlets with indesign, visual essays with photoshop"

Engaging creativity creates high impact practices and supports increased agency for students in how they express their ideas

That's nice, and I think I agree, but is there any data to support these claims?

Adobe partnered with Civitas Learning and LinkedIn to learn more.

Civitas Learning systematically and rigorously measured the impact of integrating the teaching of creative and digital literacy skills—using Adobe Creative Cloud as the primary tool—across the curriculum at three higher education institutions with at varying levels of Creative Cloud deployment. Most of the data cited are from the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA).

LinkedIn insights demonstrate the positive impact of having creative skills on the career trajectory of recent graduates and those that are already in the job market, across a broad range of job functions and industries.

Adobe Outcomes Research

Geography: "The final project in this class will involve map creation and distribution. Students will be asked to use Adobe Creative Cloud to process maps to make them accessible to a broad audience."

Along came Coronavirus

The world is now

Digital
Networked
Interconnected
Distributed
Location independent
Understood through media

In person instruction is still critical, but we have also learned some things

We are all creative

Creative, adj. (from Oxford English Dictionary)

Having the quality of creating, able to create; of or relating to creation; originative.
Inventive, imaginative; of, relating to, displaying, using, or involving imagination or original ideas as well as routine skill or intellect, esp. in literature or art.

Digital Literacy is a skill

Skills can be learned.
Skills require study and practice.
Learning by making, doing.
You don't have to be Scorsese or Picasso.

Creativity in all of its forms is the currency of the new economy

Thank you

Appreciate

Credits:

Created with images by Norm_Bosworth - "indian art petroglyph native american" • Extravis_Marketing - "paper document page" • AhmadArdity - "business stock finance" • ds_30 - "diagrams graphs charts" • Pexels - "analytics chart data" • eluela31 - "art multicoloured to dye" • Matryx - "corona covid-19 covid" • NASA - "untitled image" • Alessandro Bianchi - "light bulb on black background" • Jordan Sanchez - "Our son, Ezra River and one of the most beautifully designed balance bikes for toddlers - made from oak - BrumBrum." • Clint Patterson - "I'm prepping for my Halloween IOT project and my desk is filled with electronics, structural channel, pneumatic cylinders, and actobotics. This phase is when the creativity really comes to life when code on the internet affects objects in real life. It's a messy process, but worth it in the end."