Publication Date

5-1-2016

Language

English

Material Type(s)

Curriculum Standards

Media Format

Text/HTML, Downloadable docs

Abstract

The digital competencies outlined here are the fruits of both top-down and bottom-up initiatives at Bryn Mawr College. The Board of Trustees' Digital Bryn Mawr Task Force Report has charged Library and Information Technology Services and the College generally with ensuring that students develop the digital competencies needed to succeed in and beyond college. In 2014, Bryn Mawr College received a three-year, $800,000 grant from the Mellon foundation to create curricular and co-curricular opportunities for students to develop these competencies. In working with faculty and students on projects supported by that grant, members of the Educational Technology Services team began identifying skills that students needed and developing methods for assessing and building those skills. Their list of digital competencies has evolved into the list articulated here through conversations with other LITS staff, the faculty Committee on Libraries, Information, and Computing, the board-level Library & Information Technology Strategic Advisory Group, alumnae, Bryn Mawr's Leadership, Innovation, and Liberal Arts Center and President Kim Cassidy.

The digital competencies are intended as a framework to help individual Bryn Mawr students:

  • identify the digital skills and critical perspectives they will need to be 21st century leaders,
  • seek curricular and co-curricular opportunities to hone those skills and perspectives while at Bryn Mawr College,
  • develop ways to articulate or demonstrate their competencies to various audiences.

We assume that individual Bryn Mawr students will develop competencies in a variety of ways: for example, one might develop data management skills while conducting field research for a course project, compiling survey data as part of an internship, or serving as a research assistant in a psychology lab. The Campus Opportunities to Develop and Ways to Demonstrate Mastery listed below are merely suggestions and are not exhaustive. Digital competencies are also not static, and for each competency listed below one can envision novice, intermediate and expert levels of mastery that could be demonstrated at different points.

Although Bryn Mawr students are the primary audience, from an institutional perspective, the list will help Bryn Mawr faculty and staff evaluate curricular and co-curricular opportunities for Bryn Mawr students to develop digital competencies, better advertise existing opportunities, and identify and develop programming to fill gaps as needed.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Comments

To see how the digital competencies project is being realized at Bryn Mawr College, go to brynmawr.edu/digitalcompetencies

The framework was revised in October 2016.

Download

Share

COinS