A Collaborative Partnership to Embed Digital Competencies
The Course
The focal point for the collaborative initiative was an information literacy course, DigiComp: Core Competencies for Digital Citizenship, which has long been taught (under various titles) as part of the second-year undergraduate program in the School of Information and Communication Studies in the College of Social Sciences & Law. The course focuses on students’ development as digital citizens and, to this end, has proactively supported students as they developed critical thinking skills essential for full social participation after university.
The course challenges students to engage with an array of digital skills noted in the EU’s classification of essential digital competencies for digital citizenship (Carretero Gomez et al., 2017). In particular, students learn a variety of skills to help them locate, organize, manage, use, and create information for not only the academic setting but also for their future careers and workplaces. The course is organized around the university’s twelve-week trimester, with topics covered as follows:
- Super Searchers: The Characteristics of Effective Searchers and Users of Information
- Discerning Factual Information from Fake News, Disinformation, & Misinformation
- Engaging with Information and Academic Integrity
- Acknowledging the Work of Others Appropriately
- Digital Bibliographic Skills
- Developing Successful Digital Search and Evaluation Strategies
- Effective Collaborative Authoring in Wikipedia
- Organizing Information
- Bibliographic Control vs. Miscellany
- Expanding Citizenship: Information Published by Government
- Selecting and Utilizing Channels of Communication Effectively
Students examine a range of pathways to information through formally structured literature channels, as well as informal channels, including user-generated content, learning how to select pathways to
