Digital Literacy Skills Audit

As part of our PEDL project we have developed a skills audit to give a baseline measure of the digital literacy skills of both our peer e-guides and their student cohorts. The e-guides and learners will retake the skills audit at the end of the project to measure the distance travelled.

We wanted a skills audit which was brief , simple to complete but which also indicated future training needs. We found the style of the skills audit used by Salford University ideal. We have now produced our own set of questions, based around the definition of Digital Literacy we are using, covering:

• Use of College network ICT services
• Moodle
• Digital skills for learning – use of common application software
• Information finding skills
• Referencing and plagiarism
• E-safety
• Web 2.0 technologies

We are currently piloting the audit but aim to make it available online to learners for September.

What is Digital Literacy?

For our PEDL project we have used the term Digital Literacy to represent a broad range of skills – specifically basic ICT skills, information skills and e-safety. This offers a potentially broader remit than Information Literacy. Furthermore, Digital Literacy is probably a more widely understood term outside the library community (particularly with the link to Digital Inclusion).

With regard to basic ICT skills we are focussing on the skills needed to make the most effective of the college ICT network (eg e-mail, file handling, basic applications software) and our Moodle VLE.

The Information skills strand will cover making effective use of internet searching, accessing e-resouces and referencing/plagiarism.

We will also have a cross cutting strand on the use of Web 2.0 tools in a teaching and learning context.

We found the following documents useful when defining Digital Literacy:

Digital Britain (DCMS and BIS, 2009), The Heart of Digital Wales (WAG, 2009), Digital Inclusion in Wales (Welsh Affairs Committee, 2009), Delivering Digital Inclusion – A strategic framework for Wales (WAG, 2010) and Thriving in the 21^st century: learning literacies for the Digital Age (JISC, 2009).

Peer E- guides and Digital Literacy (PEDL)

Firstly, apologies for the lack of activity on this blog over the last 12 months or so.

However, I am going to make regular use of the blog to post the findings of a JISC e- learning project I’m currently managing.

The project works on the assumption that learners gain much of their ICT knowledge from their peers rather than from formal training.

Consequently we will train up student peer e-guides to provide informal ICT and information skills support and, most importantly, to use the e-guides as advocates for the support available through the Library & Learning Technology Service.