Digital Literacy: Institutions in Action

Colgate University has created a Digital Learning and Media Center to support class-based projects designed to interact with a digital media space. It aids formats such as video narratives, podcasts, website design, and more. It also has digital media equipment available for checkout, such as cameras, tripods, gopros, and audio recorders.

The University of Delaware provides myriad resources for enhancing student learning through digital technologies. Some examples are digital books, design and maker applications, augmented and virtual reality, and screencasting. Not only that, but they also provide full support for any of their digital technologies available.

Domain of One’s Own allows University of Mary Washington students, faculty, and staff to register their own domain name and associate it with a hosted web space, free of charge while at UMW. With their domain and corresponding web space, users will have the opportunity and flexibility to design and create a meaningful and vibrant digital identity.

Faculty and staff at Penn State University are offering support and instruction in digital literacy to help students become active participants in the digital world. One of the focuses in this article is a discussion on digital storytelling and its impact on digital fluency.

To assist student become better members of the digital world, researchers at the Stanford History Education group worked with instructors to develop curriculum to teach “civic online reasoning,” which they define as the ability to search for, evaluate, and verify social and political information.

Faculty and staff at Virginia Tech have created a digital literacy toolkit to help students and faculty to be more integrated and active in a digital space. Their toolkit focuses on seven aspects for digital literacy, these are Identity, Discovery, Evaluation, Ethics, Creation, Communication, and Curation.