Digital Literacy Skills for Faculty and Students

Register, mark your calendars and join us online for another Live, Desktop Presentation! It will be conducted in Wimba, an online collaboration and presentation tool.

Thursday, November 12 Noon – 1 p.m.
Digital Literacy Skills for Faculty and Students
Co-presented by Valerie Shapko, Sr. Instructional Design Specialist and Tracey Mac Gowan, Instructional Design Specialist, College of Professional Education

Being digitally literate encompasses much more than just technology. This type of literacy requires the skills to take in, crunch, seek, find and create with technology in thoughtful and discerning ways. The digital landscape is changing the way students connect socially and professionally, seek out and use content, read, explore, write and understand their world. What do these changes mean for how we teach and who we are as teachers? What benefits and challenges do instructors face as they enter the rich and often overwhelming world of digital tools, global connectivity and a planet’s worth of information just a mouse-click away? How does an instructor make informed choices for using digital tools for teaching and learning? How can instructors use technology to accomplish their course learning objectives and help students become more mindful, discerning and literate regarding the digital landscape? Join us as we explore these issues and possible solutions.

To attend, you must Register. The registration deadline is Tuesday, November 10 at 11:45 p.m. If you register, you will be sent your log-in information prior to the event.

Please visit http://www.twu.edu/de/development.asp for more details on other upcoming professional development opportunities.

15th Annual Sloan-C Conference, Andrew Keen

Last week I traveled to the 15th Annual Sloan-C Conference in sunny Orlando, Florida. It was a great conference with plenty of sessions to choose from. The only drawback was that the sessions were about 35 minutes long, so the presenters were racing to get through their information with little time for any real discussion; seemed to me to be somewhat like speed-dating.
The theme for me was faculty development for the online environment. It was very interesting to put side-by-side what we here in Distance Education at Texas Woman’s University are doing compared to the other institutions. Without prejudice, I believe we are much further along in our delivery of faculty development programs and service we are able to offer our faculty.
I was most intrigued by the Thursday morning breakfast speaker Andrew Keen. Keen, a British Entrepreneur who has dabbled in and around Silicon Valley, has become a mouthpiece for the concerns of Web 2.0 and the negative effects on our culture and authority. An interesting analogy was painted of the rise of the Internet and the 1960’s rise of the Hippie culture and a mistrust of one’s government ideology. I almost felt I was in the presence of the Ralph Nader of the Internet; the scary thing is I couldn’t really argue any of his points. The broad highway of the Internet does have a ditch on most sides and we are the ones that need to monitor this landscape of all edges and no center.
If you want to know more about Andrew Keen check out his Blog and Web Site at http://andrewkeen.typepad.com/ajkeenspeaking/bio.html.