It could easily be a mantra for Jisc too, but ‘Let’s Go Digital’ is the key focus of the 2017 CoLRIC events celebrating how libraries are successfully creating a digital culture and are supporting teaching and learning with the digital literacies agenda.
I was lucky enough to have been invited along to their London event at Friends House to share Jisc’s work in this area and had a great day catching up with librarians from across the country and making new friends along the way (don’t worry if you missed this – CoLRIC is repeating the event at Kirklees College on the 16th June that my colleague, Lis Parcell, is attending).
The aim of my session was not only to flag the work Jisc has produced around digital capability (more on this later), but also to surface many of the fabulous examples that libraries up and down the country are doing to help others use digital more effectively. Many of these examples were showcased during the day and here are some of the highlights (in programme order):-
- Deb Kellsey Millar gave a passionate talk that championed the learners themselves and their role in working alongside academics to foster an inclusive digital culture. Many may have already come across Deb’s former work at Blackburn College on DigiPals and Learning Wheels, both of which stress a collaborative approach to engaging people with digital.
- Kate Grigsby, Senior Library Skills Advisor at the University of Sheffield, delivered a comprehensive overview of the Information Skills Resource that provides a plethora of targeted topics designed to empower students with digital. There was a good degree of interaction in Kate’s session too where she had set up padlets to crowdsource examples from the audience (click here to see what tools others are using to support information skills delivery).
- Jim Temple at Aquinas College gave a nod to Jisc’s digital capability framework in his presentation, but stressed how e-safety and digital identity were threads that ran through their framework as they had a large number of younger learners. Aquinas College had also recently been piloting Jisc’s Student Digital Experience Tracker and had set up eAmbassadors amongst the student cohort to support digital initiatives across the college.
- The CoLRIC Awards also took place during the event and I was pleased to see Andrew Eynon pick up an award, who I’d worked with previously at a library conference. My congratulations to the other CoLRIC Award winners present too – Grazyna Kuczera of Northampton College and Heather Roberts at the City of Liverpool College.
- Andy Eachus, Digital Learning Manager at Salford City College, closed the event by giving us a whistle-stop tour of the many exciting initiatives currently taking place at Salford, from ensuring digital is embedded into staff workflows and duly celebrated with digital badges, to supporting staff with handy digibytes (small online tutorials to empower staff with a range of digital technologies). Andy even finished off by giving us a flash demo of how they were using augmented reality too!
All in all, it was a very enjoyable day and I was really pleased to see so many people benefit from the developing work of Jisc projects and reference the supporting research that goes with them, including Jisc’s digital capability framework, the digital capability profiles and Jisc’s newly published guide Developing Organisational Approaches to Digital Capability.
Well done to CoLRIC and everyone involved on the day for putting on a great event and if you would like to attend the next one at Kirklees College click here.
