Monday, July 14, 2008

Digital Literacy at UC Davis

What does it mean for UC Davis students to be "digitally literate"?

This is a question on the minds of many of us at the TRC--and many of your minds as well, as I know from talking with you. We're drafting a guide for students to help them understand what skills faculty believe they'll need to succeed as undergrads.

Some skills on our list:

  • Use the full feature set of a personal computer to support learning through course work, analysis and preparation of documents, review of online resources. In particular, learn how to prepare, edit, save, transfer, label, store and retrieve digital files that correspond to text, audio, video and numerical data.
  • Critically examine digital files of all sorts –text, audio, video, numerical and hypermedia--in terms of their publication history, authorship, social and technical origins, credibility, copyright status, and privacy status.
  • Manage your computer files, email and web links to ensure that you can find and respond to what’s most important when you need to.
  • Recognize and avoid problematic software, including email SPAM, phishing, and viruses.
  • Install and uninstall software, including “player” plugins such as Adobe Reader, RealAudio, QuickTime, etc.
  • Determine and recognize different attributes of a digital file, including: file types and “extensions” for text, image, audio, video, spreadsheet; file size, locations and paths; creation and modification dates.
  • Find and evaluate online collections and digital resources related to your program of study and individual learning objectives.
  • Search through UCD library from on-campus and off-campus locations.
What's on your list? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

1 comment:

Mikaela said...

Interesting ideas here!

I have one comment about the current list of goals: they seem to fall into two categories to me. First, there are many functional goals, such as learning to use a computer effectively. Second, there are intellectual goals, such as evaluating the importance of online materials to understanding the information in their field.

I think they're both important, though I'd probably give them two separate subheadings...?