Three Approaches for Integrating Digital Literacy into the Curriculum Justin Hodgson | Indiana University

Practical Values of Digital Literacy Today

• When we give students the opportunity to learn digital literacy skills and new media authoring practices, we quite literally expand their capacities for expression. This helps students not only to tell better stories but, more importantly, take on greater (or different) degrees of agency.
• When we invite students to create with digital technologies, we give them access to course content, ideas, and practices in new ways. This is not only a matter of what they might make (i.e., a podcast), but fundamentally how they might engage a given course’s content.
• When working in and across digital modalities, students can have meaningful success outside traditional modes of academic discourse. This is especially important for DEI efforts, including 1st gen, non-traditional, and international students, for many of whom traditional academic discourse can be a major hurdle if not insurmountable barrier.
• When creating digital "things," students actively want to share their work. There is a built-in public-facing condition when making digital things, and many of us, students and faculty alike, see and feel the reality of a persistent digital audience, that underlying ‘meant to be seen’ condition as when we are engaged in digital making.

Pedagogical Transformation(s)

As instructors create space for more digital literacy and/or active learning in the classroom, some of the core policies and practices of the class may have to evolve as well to accommodate this new orientation.

New Course Model | Digital Literacy + Active Learning (e.g., ENG-W171@IU)

This new course in the IU curriculum was co-created by Justin Hodgson and Miranda Rodak (IU Bloomington). W171 fulfills the First Year Writing Gen Ed requirement at IU, brings together active learning and digital literacy, and features a mentor / apprentice co-instructional model.

New Course Feature | Tokens

What are Tokens?

Tokens are a course design feature that can help lower student anxiety about course work and foster a climate committed to taking intellectual risks. They function as a form of currency (given and earned) that can be exchanged for a number of uses.

What can Tokens be used for?

• 72-hour Extension: This is a "no questions asked" guaranteed extension (excludes Final Course Projects)
• Revise & Resubmit: Allows students to revise and resubmit for an improved letter grade any assignment from class
• Excused Absence: Students can use a token to offset an absence that might otherwise be penalized
• 1% Grade Bump: At the end of the semester, students can use a token to earn a 1% bonus on their final grade
• Collaborator's Pass: Students can use a token to transform any assignment into a collaborative assignment. (Note: all collaborators must use a token.)

How many tokens do students start with? How many can they earn?

I give students 2 tokens at the start of class and they have the opportunity to earn more throughout the semester. The baseline or the number of potential tokens is usually 2 + the number of major assignments in course.

• e.g., if I have 3 major assignments in a course, there would be the 2 at the start plus 3-4 Token Challenges during the semester in which students can earn additional tokens.

Assessing Digital Projects

Click the button for a fuller breakdown of the four approaches listed below

• SEC Approach (Self-Evaluative Criteria) - Students generate the criteria by which they want to be evaluated and then submit a self-evaluation using those criteria.
• Genre Approach - Students (in conjunction with faculty) do a genre analysis and identify key features. Then they turn those features into assessment criteria.
• Kuhn+2 Model - Provides a a wholistic set of criteria (6 interrelated categories) for responding to digital projects, anchoring the assessment conceptually and rhetorically.
• Learning Record Method - Tracks learning across teh course of a semester and asks students to curate evidence of their learning and to use that evidence to make the case for their course grade.

Assignment Redesign

When going through the process of turning a traditional assignment into a digital assignment, I tend to work on multiple levels, considering matters of materiality, access, assessment, and the like. As a general orientation, I usually begin with the following questions:

• Given the available media and technologies, what kinds of assignments and activities can students reasonably undertake/complete?
• Can those activities replace an existing assignment or will this call for an all new kind of engagement?
• In what ways will I need to change my expectations and assessment practices?
• Are there any useful assessment models out there that I might readily leverage? If not, what kinds of assessment will I employ?
• What is my assessment focus in this undertaking? Final product? Process? The learning involved?

While I use these questions to guide my more nuanced assignment engagements, there three general approaches I use (increasing in complexity): Platform Swap, Open-Ended Assignments, and Collective Projects.

Platform Swap

The basic idea with the Platform Swap is to switch the medium or authoring platform of an existing assignment: e.g., take a traditional essay/paper on X and have the students create it as an Adobe Spark page or turn a reading response into video (vlog) via Adobe Rush.Once you have the swap in mind (traditional X for digital Y), you need to think about your approach:

• What are some low-stakes learning opportunities to ease students into the assignment and technology?
• How should I alter my expectations for the assignment?

Open-Ended Assignments

Open-Ended Assignments allow students to work within the course focus and assignment constraints to design their own projects and engagements. The basic idea is for instructors to provide an assignment framework (orientation and general guides for the engagement) and for students to identify their own exigencies for a project. Then, students create their projects in response to those exigencies, but do so within the guiding framework. The key is to require not only that the assignments be created for digital distribution (and/or feature a clear digital literacy element), but also that students complete some form of reflective component (design/project rationale, learning reflection, etc.).

Collective Project

The goal is to get the entire class (or large sections of class) to work on the same project, with each student and/or group creating multiple elements for this "epic" challenge (to borrow lingo from video games). The key is to invite students to select a project that intimately involves digital creativity/digital literacy practices and to work with them to complete those challenges: e.g., creating a class magazine (which requires InDesign and Photoshop) or building a set of artifacts for a singular event (e.g., campus-wide evacuation plan, which may require video, audio, and print media). The scale/focus can vary, but what matters is the collective effort from the students toward one final output (or portfolio of outputs) and the collaboration between the instructor and students to get there (instructor as guide/facilitator/project manager/collaborator).