In this final month of 2021, I am happy to receive news that an edited collection chapter has just been published in the latest Springer Networked Learning series. In this chapter, my colleagues Ann Hill Duin and Isabel Pedersen and I share our experience in teaching with a digital archive that traces the emergence of new technologies. We find the pedagogical use of such archive to be beneficial to technical communication students in exploring the social and technical impacts of new technologies on their respective fields of interests.

Abstract

This exploratory study examines instructor discussion, instructional development, and study of student building of digital literacy as a result of the use and/or curation of Fabric of Digital Life (https://fabricofdigitallife.com/) collections on emerging technologies. Over three phases (January 2019 through May 2020), instructors and students across multiple institutions developed an understanding of digital literacy, designing and using a set of instructional materials for student exploration and/or curation of collections in this repository as a means to build student digital literacy. Strong human/inter-personal relationships evolved from instructors’ joint inquiry, problem solving, development and deployment of instructional resources.

Critical to this work is the collaborative engagement in place to foster and support instructional development, pedagogical deployments, and associated research. This collaborative engagement, spearheaded by the Digital Life Institute at Ontario Tech University in Canada with research affiliates at the University of Minnesota and Texas Tech University in the United States, evolved as a networked learning collaborative to promote connections between people, sites, and contexts; to build a network in support of joint problem solving and knowledge creation; and to build a strong community for collective intention surrounding digital literacy understanding and student digital literacy development.

Find our chapter at this link. 😃