Justin Hodgson | @postdigitalJH | hodgson@indiana.edu

CONTEXT

Indiana University is a public, research intensive institution in the midwest ("Indiana is the crossroads of America") rooted in liberal arts and sciences. We are 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, as well as leading programs in education, nursing, art and design, public and environmental affairs, and so on. IU draws students from all over Indiana as well as the other 49 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

EXIGENCE

The 2021 Brookings Report, commissioned by the Indiana Commission of Higher Education, argued that the development of digital skills, with equal investments in digital literacy and employee upskilling, were key to jump-starting the state’s economic recovery (76).

• Top recommendations: accelerate digital adoption, from academia to industry, and include digital skills development in the Indiana College Core.

But rather than add a new requirement to the college core, we sought to highlight innovative digital literacy efforts across IU and create programs that help integrate digital literacy into existing curriculum and practices.

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. It includes faculty, student, and K-12 outreach efforts, all committed to improving digital competencies and technological fluencies across IU as well as making an impact state-wide.

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 must

• attend 5 of 6 scheduled engagements,
• produce at least one curriculum asset,
• work in groups to create macro level strategies for DL integration, and
• complete a professional development reflection.

Fellows receive a small stipend and have the opportunity to apply for additional funding to support macro level strategies / efforts.

Program events include

• software and platform training (creative technologies, media production, cloud computing, etc.)
• practical guides and approaches for integrating information and media literacy into the classroom,
• strategies for bringing digital literacy (broadly construed) into course engagements and activities,
• workshops on assignment design and assessment, and
• a series optional presentations, workshops, etc.: e.g., guides on visual design principles, speed-dating events featuring new technologies, demonstrations on using tools (like Hypothesis and social annotation), strategies for creating more interactive video-based instructional assets (via Playposit or Kaltura), glimpses at AR/VR practices, and introductions to available campus resources (e.g., Idea Garden @ IUPUI; Adobe Ambassadors; eLearning Design and Services; etc.)

Kick-Off Event

On Jan 21, 2022, we held our DGFF Kick-off (see agenda). Due to Omicron / COVID-19, we moved to a fully-virtual format for the event, using SpatialChat as our virtual platform. At the kick-off, we focused on building creative confidence and fostering community among our participants--doing so by guiding them through three key activities and conversations:

• an opening Think-Pair-Make-Share (TPMS) engagement (active learning + digital creativity), which helped familiarize participants with Adobe CC Express Post;
• a reflective webpage construction asking them to think about how they understand digital literacy and how they might start to imagine it in their courses (Adobe CC Express & Me)--this also had the added benefit of familiarizing participants with Adobe CC Express webpage and Adobe Stock; and
• an afternoon Curriculum Builder Challenge, which asked them to start to apply what they had learned: i.e., how they might use the four tools they had encountered (SpatialChat, Express Post, Express Page, Stock) in their own practices and classrooms.

EXAMPLES & OUTPUTS

After participants completed the TPMS activity, they had to pin their image creations to the SpatialChat space (a.k.a., our "Farmer's Market").