Which is just to say that I’d be very interested in contributing to a document of the sort you describe.

Jim, it’d be great to walk away with something concrete that acted a sort of action plan. The conceptual problem, though, is that it takes years to get any real plan moving in a university setting. The kinds of literacies that we’re interested in here, though, are such that they are constantly changing. Ten years ago it would have been a no-brainer that knowledge of HTML tags would be a must-have, but it’s not clear whether that’s true anymore. (Certainly you don’t have to know assembly code these days, which would have been an absolute necessity for the digital literacy of 30 years ago.) So any list of goals that we create might have to be dual-layered: one layer containing the specific literacies that we want students to develop, and another containing the reasoning that led to the first layer. That way, when technology changes in such a way that the first-order skills are different, or are ranked differently in terms of importance, we’ll have a consistent methodology for rethinking the goals.

A theme that I detect running through both Erin’s and Doug’s comments is that the kinds of skills I’m pushing here are not monolithic. Though I didn’t stress it in my blog post, I couldn’t agree more. Doug, your suggestions for how we might describe different kinds of “digital literacies” are a great start. Looking for direct correlates of traditional literacies in the digital, as you have, is a nice political strategy, since it’s more likely that you’ll convince a large proportion of the academy of the importance of digital literacy if you can show how it is, at its core, made up largely of the traditional literacies that we all already value. I don’t want to deemphasize the literacies that may be totally new to digital media, though: literacies surrounding mashups (both consuming and creating); understanding of how technologies like search engines filter and mitigate our access to knowledge; the effect on knowledge creation of massive networking; etc.

In any case, it’d be extremely helpful to come up with a sort of hierarchy of abilities that we think are valuable for students. Here’s a model from my own campus, Queens College: qcpages.qc.cuny.edu/writing/Goals.htm. WAC spearheaded a project to formalize the college’s goals surrounding the teaching of writing, framed by the question “What do we want our students to be able to do with writing by the time they graduate?” The document was then ratified by the Academic Senate, lending it a certain wait and officialness. (The problem with making such a document for digital literacies is, of course, that their constant evolution makes it more difficult to get a good sense of what’s really valuable and what’s just trendy.)

Erin, I love your suggestion that some of the skills involved might be quantified as “basic” and thus taught in a required, dedicated lower-level class. This isn’t so different from the idea of a compulsory composition or “Introduction to College Writing” course for freshman, which is already in place at many schools.

So for digital literacy, I’m wondering what would be the parallels to reading, writing and understanding of audience? Perhaps Familiarity/Savvy/Up-to-dateness, Application and Programming skills, and “Ability to synthesize different digital tools to solve problems”?

This topic sparks threads I’m interested, including backing up and asking what we want to do and why with digital technology, digital technology as a set of “tools” as opposed to an end in and of itself, and also notion of computer “fearlessness”, which I’ve observed as the essential element between the e-literate and the less so… looking forward to talking about some of this. Thanks.

However, when it comes to technology training, it seems to end with whatever is the most rudimentary skill needed to survive (maybe attaching a file to an email or using MS Office and EndNote). What if we took a similar approach to WAC and said by the time you are taking that upper division humanities course, you should be comfortable writing for the web and have at least a basic understanding of HTML/CSS, servers, etc? These prereqs could be handled outside the department, but then built upon with more advanced work that is directly related to the field of study.

As someone who provides instructional and tech support for digital projects in the classroom, I think the biggest barrier to making those projects even better is that most students have absolutely zero experience with this stuff so they make predictable (and forgivable) mistakes. They lack the judgment that comes with being able to use/build/evaluate digital objects and resources, and often they lack the vocabulary needed to discuss it. And most of the time, we rob them of the valuable learning experience that is making something, breaking it on accident, and then figuring out how to fix it (who is really willing to give their students that kind of access?). The worst part is, they could accomplish so much with a one semester course in “College Computing” (or something) that it would literally open up a new world for instructors that want to leverage technology in their classrooms and research. With continued emphasis in specified courses (Computing Across the Curriculum?) digital content creation by students in higher education would blossom.

I could go on and on, but basically, I love this idea, and look forward to hearing more.