Digital Literacies For Biologists - Part 2

Last week over at the @leBioscience blog I published a post about Digital Literacies for Biological Science Students. The purpose of @leBioscience is to highlight best practice and research into teaching and learning within the School of Biological Sciences. The blog faces two ways - outwards to the World and inwards towards my colleagues. As is my practice, after I published the post, I distributed it locally via email. This Dark Social channel led to a lively and useful discussion. The purpose of this post is to surface and continue that dialogue.

After thinking about this over the weekend, it's clear that there is no real definition of digital literacy - the term obviously means different things to different people. That explains much of the wooliness of the debate. For that reason, it seems to me that the best way forward is to try to cut through the fog by adopting a pragmatic approach and avoiding the worst of the confusion.

Hard skills, e.g:

Statistical software (R)
Data processing
Bibliographic data
- and?
Teach in house, integrate with curriculum.

Soft skills, e.g:

Online identity
Social media
Multimedia
Keyboard skills (hugely important and almost always overlooked)
- and?
Outsource, augment curriculum.

I will be promoting this approach during out forthcoming curriculum redesign process. Will this view prevail, or will the whole thing get swept under the carpet because we can't agree what digital literacy is for our students?

A.J. Cann