All Eyes on Digital Literacy

Digital literacy remains a key developmental task for academic librarians, and this even gave practitioners a great chance to catch up on recent developments.

On the 18th January the latest Mercian Staff Development Group event was held at Coventry University focusing on digital literacy. This was a highly popular event, which ‘sold out’ quite rapidly, demonstrating the fierce interest across the region in this topic.

Becky Collins (Coventry University) kicked off the day with her presentation on creating an online game for induction. She was followed by Daniel Villar-Onrubia (Coventry) from the university’s Disruptive Media Learning Lab’s talk, exploring critical digital literacies. In particular, he shared examples of various online tools that library staff can use to demonstrate to students how their data is being used. [Wonder if this’ll generate some data subject access requests! Ed]. I think this is a perspective which is often overlooked by librarians, so it was especially interesting to hear from someone working outside of librarianship.

Hannah Hickman (Worcester) then gave a presentation which drew on her institution’s experiences with the digital capabilities tool. This was followed by a lively group discussion, which gave attendees an excellent opportunity to talk to each other about how digital literacy is approached in their own institutions. It rapidly became clear library colleagues from across the Collaboration’s region come up against the same sort of digital literacy challenges, which was extremely useful to learn.

Our final presentation of the day came from Richard Perkins and Catriona Matthews (Warwick), who spoke about the digital literacy programme they designed in collaboration with academic staff.

Throughout the event delegates were engaged and stimulated by discussions, and welcomed the opportunity to hear from the speakers not to mention exchange personal experiences in this area.