Highlights reel for 2023 

by the members of the Digital Dexterity Blog Group

Emma Chapman, Auckland University of Technology | Te Wānanga Aronui o Tāmaki Makau Rau:

AI has sure been big on the agenda this year. I’ve gone through all stages of excitement and grief with this topic. I think there was a time mid-year when AI-fatigue set in. But, the latest post on prompt engineering really re-ignites interest for me – as does the development of new, improved AI models. Sadly, as most of these are paid, I think an AI-digital divide could be the next thing we see. Meantime, I’ll keep working on trying to craft killer prompts (and keep trying to make GIFs that do not make me seasick). Merry holidays and a peaceful new year to all.  

Kristy Newton, University of Wollongong:

I’m not sure if we can refer to the year that has been 2023 without also saying the phrase “Generative AI”, and libraries (like everyone else) scrambled to understand how we could use these tools, whether we could use them ethically, and what this all meant for critical literacies. It’s been both exciting and fatiguing as others noted, but an absolute game changer. The blog has been a great space to facilitate discussions, share opinions, and learn from each other about this and about all things digital dexterity. 

Krista Yuen, University of Waikato | Te Whare Wānanga o Waikato:

I only joined the DigiDex community and blog group about halfway through 2023, and I honestly think I’m still finding my feet. That said, getting to know the fellow blog group has no doubt been a highlight for me. Coupled with the upward trend of Generative AI and navigating a new world of literacies in libraries and education, it has certainly made for a very interesting time to be involved with DigiDex. It has been a real honour to partake in and witness all the discussions we’ve had around the use of AI and how to best support and embrace these advancements. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing what 2024 will bring! 

Sara Davidsson, CAVAL:

The diversity of topics and voices in the blog has been my highlight for 2023. We have been able to deliver posts from our extended DigiDex community, written especially for the blog, as well as showcasing interesting articles from far and near. I am so happy to see that our readers keep returning every month for more posts! 

Danielle Degiorgio, Edith Cowan University:

It’s been an absolutely fascinating year diving into the world of AI. I’m genuinely thrilled by how these technologies are revolutionising the way we work in libraries and education as a whole. I’ve particularly enjoyed exploring how generative AI tools can support and foster creativity and innovative learning. It’s an exciting time to be in the field, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the future holds! 

Also, a big shoutout to our DigiDex blog group for their amazing work this year. They’ve done a stellar job in capturing these advancements and discussions around AI in libraries. It’s been inspiring to see their dedication and creativity in action. Kudos to the team for their exceptional work. 

Marianne Sato, University of Queensland:

I love reading the new Digital Dexterity blog posts each month. And being part of the blog group, I often get a sneak preview! The posts about different aspects of AI, finding and creating inclusive OER, and how websites work have been highlights for me this year. The blog posts always have so many great ideas or innovative solutions that I can apply to my work. AI definitely had a big impact this year and I suspect every year from now on. I look forward to reading more great posts in 2024! 

From all of us, we wish our loyal readers a happy and peaceful holiday season and all the best for 2024! We will return with a new blog post on 29 January.

Decorative image of tree branches laid out in a festive way
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Meet the Blog Bunch

Blog Bunch, we’re the blog bunch, we’re a modern digi blog family…..

Have you ever wondered who the team is that puts this blog together? Meet the Blog Bunch!

Sara Davidsson is currently in the role of Member Services Coordinator at CAVAL Ltd. The role gives her the opportunity to advocate within areas that are close to her heart, such as professional development for staff and the importance of learning, education and literacy in the academic and wider community. Being part of the Digital Dexterity blog editorial team further adds to this effort of advocacy and content curation as the blog posts benefit the professional development of so many.

Sara is originally from Sweden, and thus has a healthy obsession with IKEA, ABBA, and pickled herring.

Marianne Sato is a Digital Content Specialist at the University of Queensland (UQ) Library. Her role involves creating all kinds of digital content and supporting others to create their own content. She is interested in ways to improve the student experience, particularly around the use of open educational resources and accessibility. Being part of the Digital Dexterity blog group has helped her learn about and share many amazing digital literacy initiatives and ideas. Marianne would love to live on an Animal Crossing New Horizons Island forever but for now just plays the game instead. 

Emeka Anele is a Learning Designer at Deakin University Library. His role involves socialising, communicating and capability building others in digital content creation, platform usage and digital literacies. He has a strong interest in the ways people interact with library content. This blog group is another avenue for communicating interesting work in the digital space to a wider audience. Outside of work Emeka is dreaming about his next overseas adventure, which will probably be another trip to Japan.

Kristy Newton is the Digital Literacies Coordinator at UOW Library and loves to empower people with the skills and confidence to be autonomous in the digital world. She loves being in the blog group because the blog allows people to learn through sharing stories and experiences, and brings people’s voices to a wider audience. Outside libraries she plays bass in a rock band, supports community skills in permaculture, and cooks really good vegan Mexican food!

Krista Yuen is a Teaching and Learning Librarian at the University of Waikato Library in Aotearoa, New Zealand. This role sees her connecting with a wide variety of people with different interests, skills, and backgrounds. She loves exploring with digital technologies and finding or advocating for ways to build and increase people’s digital literacy skills and capabilities. Joining the Digital Dexterity blog group has allowed her to broaden her network, learn from other people’s stories and experiences and share these initiatives in a virtual space. Outside of libraries, Krista can be seen either paddling with her dragon boat team, taking too many photos of her dog, or trying out a new board game with friends

Kasthuri Anandasivam, currently the Digital Curriculum Librarian at UniSA, is dedicated to empowering individuals with the skills and confidence needed to navigate the digital world independently.

She focuses on advancing online learning environments, particularly in AI and digital literacy tools & frameworks, aiming to support innovation and scholarship.

Originally from Sri Lanka, spicy food and family hold sway in her daily life.

The Blog Bunch want to say a big THANKYOU to all our contributing authors – you’ve helped make this blog the informative and topical resource it is today! If you’ve ever wanted to contribute, 2024 could be your year! Have a chat to one of the Blog Bunch or send an email to digidexbloggroup@lists.caval.edu.au

A collaborative approach to student digital skills support: The UOW Digital Skills Hub

By Kristy Newton, Digital Literacies Coordinator (UOW Library)

Digital literacies, digital capabilities, digital dexterity… no matter what you call them, these are an essential and complex set of practical skills, attitudes and contextual understanding that help us navigate and interact with the digital world. They can span everything from learning how to use a new piece of software, to understanding how communication styles differ depending on the channel you are using to communicate, to developing a growth mindset that enables you to engage in a process of continual learning and development. This post outlines the process of developing the UOW Student Digital Skills Hub as a strategy for supporting student digital skill development.

A collaborative approach

At UOW, we recognised that a collaborative approach was essential for supporting student digital literacies and that this collaboration needed to be seamless for students to access. There had been collaborative work on developing an institutional approach to digital literacies for a few years, but the unexpected challenges of COVID19 and the rapid transition to remote learning meant that a lot of that work was paused to allow staff to address the immediate challenges presented by the pandemic. Libraries are often champions of digital literacy development, but the complex interplay of practical skills and digital behaviours means that digital literacy support at an institutional level spans several units with areas of expertise. The IT support units are an obvious match for the development of technical skills, but the development of digital capabilities at University also incorporates clever learning design that means students encounter these development opportunities in ways that are meaningful for their learning, and a future careers perspective that contextualises their skill development in relation to their professional post-University lives. 

Stakeholders from the Pro Vice Chancellor (Students) Unit, Information Management and Technology Services (IMTS) Unit, and Learning Teaching & Curriculum (LTC) Unit are all strategic partners in the creation of the Digital Skills Hub. While the Library has a strong history of supporting digital literacies, as well as supporting the more traditional information literacies, it was important to us, that the site was not recognised solely as a Library site. We felt that this might compromise the value of the site for students who might think it was just about using databases rather than the broader range of digital skills and behaviours that make up their everyday lives.

The Digital Skills Hub

In late 2021, the Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic and Student Life) revitalised the institutional conversation about digital literacies as part of a strategy for supporting student success, and identified the Library as a key stakeholder in this initiative.  In response, we created an online Digital Skills Hub – a one-stop shop for students to be able to access all the digital literacy support that they needed. The Hub provides a consistent location for students who don’t know where to find digital literacy support, recognising that they often need to seek support from a variety of different units and departments, but don’t know which unit to approach for help with their specific problem. Having all the content in one place makes this an easier proposition, particularly for students who are less digitally literate. Pragmatically, because we had the support of the DVC (A&SL), we were able to secure support in embedding a link to the Digital Skills Hub in all the subject Moodle sites. This means that it was easily accessible for most students, in a location that they were already accessing for academic purposes.

One of the factors that made the Digital Skills Hub possible, was the acquisition of the JISC Digital Capabilities service. This included the Discovery Tool, a tool which allows students to undertake a self-assessment and receive a personalised report on their digital skills. Alongside the Discovery Tool, the JISC site provided a suite of support resources, and capacity for us to create UOW specific support resources that are embedded in the JISC reports. The JISC interface also provides us with valuable information in the form of an institutional dashboard. This highlights student skills across the different capability areas and provides a heat map of where the strengths and areas for development lie across different student types and different faculties. The data is de-identified, so we can’t see what a particular students progress might look like, but it does give us a good idea of trends, enabling us to target support services where they are needed.

A one stop shop for digital skills information

The front page of the Student Digital Skills Hub

There are three main ways that the Digital Skills Hub supports students:
– It provides them with access to the JISC Discovery Tool, a self evaluation tool that illustrates each student’s personal strengths and weaknesses in relation to digital skills and provides them with a customised report and suggested actions/resources for developing those skills further.

– It explores Digital Capabilities through the lens of the JISC Digital Capabilities Framework, and highlights how those framework areas relate to everyday skills and digital behaviours

– It provides them with easy access to a knowledge base of FAQs on a variety of digital skills topics and gives them the opportunity to chat/ask a question. This knowledge base incorporates existing relevant FAQs as well as newly created FAQs that are specifically designed to support the needs of the Hub.

There is also a rating system for students to rate their satisfaction with the site, as well as a link for them to provide feedback. 

Key points to consider

For institutions interested in doing something similar, the following points are worthy of consideration.

  • It’s important to get the strategic support of the different units that make up the digital literacies support services for students. Creating a site where some support is offered, but students need to go elsewhere for different kinds of tasks, just creates barriers for students.
  • An accessible and well-designed platform is key to the success of the site. You want to make sure that students with lower levels of digital skills can access the site and find it easy to navigate. 
  • Centre the development of the site on the needs of the students who will be using it. We are using an iterative design process, which means that we take on board student feedback and insights from the literature to inform the way the site develops. We see the Digital Skills Hub as a constantly evolving resource that will continue to be shaped and developed by the needs of the people using it.

Six months on from the creation of the site, we are currently engaged in a process of seeking feedback to inform the way that the site develops in the future. This is driven by an iterative, human-centred approach to content development that commits to continuously evaluating whether the site meets user needs, and adapting and evolving the site to ensure it continues to do so.

Happy Birthday Digital Skills GitBook!

By Bryony Hawthorn and Nica Tsakmakis  Digidexlibrarians+gitbook@gmail.com

Gosh, how time flies! On the 6th of August the Living Book of Digital Skills (You never knew you needed until now) turns one! And what a year it has been. 

Image CC-BY-SA The Living Book of Digital Skills

Like any first year of life, the Digital Skills GitBook has had its fair share of trips and falls but has learned a lot and grown along the way.  

As proud parents, the GitBook family has shown off its many possibilities around Australia, including taking it to Canberra for ALIA National and Melbourne for VALA, to the Research Support Community Day, and to eResearch Australasia. 

We’ve also been feeding our young GitBook a regular diet of Shut Up and Write sessions. These are helping our book grow like a tree. We have been writing content for the GitBook on heaps of suggested topics.  

Just like any family, people come and go, and move around. We know it takes a community to raise a child and write a book. We now need our community to help shape our baby into a young adult.  

We are looking for people keen to help us keep our baby growing! You can contribute by: 

  • Suggesting a topic for the book 
  • Helping us maintain the book 
  • Giving us feedback on the book 
  • Contributing a chapter that you write on a suggested topic or a topic of your choice 

If you think you might be keen to write a chapter, you don’t necessarily need to write new content. It could be that you already have suitable content you’ve written for other projects. We will credit you as authors for your work.  

Don’t be shy about contributing! We have a helpful short video for anyone who wants to know how to join our family and support us by adding useful content so others can grow from the fruits of our book. This video takes you step by step through using GitHub to contribute – what an awesome skill to add to your repertoire! 

If after watching the video, you’re still a bit nervous of contributing via GitHub, that’s ok. Just email your content to us and we’ll do the rest. 

Another option is to join the camaraderie of one of our Shut Up and Write sessions. Come to the next session on Tuesday 9th August and SUAW with a bunch of other folk, so the GitBook can continue to branch out. It is productive and fun. You can even write with a partner on a topic that interests you both.

If you can’t make this date, just email us for the next one. We have one a month for the rest of the year.

While we’ve given this book a personality, we do need your help to make the book a successful reality.

So please contact us via email Digidexlibrarians+gitbook@gmail.com if you have any questions or have content you can share.  

Power BI: Data Wrangling and Fish

Danielle Degiorgio, Digital and Information Literacy Project Adviser, Edith Cowan University Library
Sue Khoo, Librarian (Digital and Information Literacy), Edith Cowan University Library

What is Power BI?

Power BI is a Microsoft data visualisation tool that displays data in an easy-to-read format and allows users to interact and show relationships between different data sets.

Why Power BI?

Our goal was simple, we wanted to connect the mapping of digital and information literacy skills across the course curriculum to the teaching and learning activities we were doing each semester. We just had one problem, we were recording our data and statistics in multiple spreadsheets.

As luck would have it, the 2021 VALA Tech Camp was hosted at Edith Cowan University Library that year and we were introduced to Power BI through a series of workshops. Soon after we decided to use Power BI to help us keep track of student statistics in a more visually appealing way and it let us connect multiple sources of data. This meant we could compare, filter, and visualise relationships between multiple spreadsheets which allowed us, and more importantly our manager, to see our progress across courses.

Power BI: Visualisation of mapped digital and information literacy skills in courses.

Things we got Power BI to do:

  • Connect information from multiple spreadsheets to show how much digital and information literacy skills coverage we have in each course. 
  • Filter and display subsets of data. 
  • Be hosted in Microsoft Teams for ease of access where the report can be shared and displayed as a tab in Teams. 
  • Automatically update data from SharePoint, so having all our sheets hosted on SharePoint / Microsoft Teams mean we can easily add data into the model. Our Power BI reads directly from SharePoint files and updates at 9am every day.

Skills: What magic do you need?

  • Spreadsheet and table management – Power BI relies on external data. You must have the data cleaned and stored in a data source such as Excel (or databases such as Salesforce or Access).
  • Logic and relationship management – Connections can be 1-1 and 1-many but only one model may exist at a time. If there are conflicts Power BI will complain.
  • Ability to play with formulas and data types – If you need a relationship that isn’t expressed in the Power BI map you will need to learn to write the formula for it.
  • How to put together a graph – Knowing what graph suits your needs be it a scatter plot, ribbon chart, pie chart, or fish.
  • Professional Google skills – If something goes wrong, be ready to Google it!

Pitfalls: What to watch out for

  • A lot of trial and error and Googling – No training will prepare you for what you want to do. There may be things you want to do but Power BI only gives you the basic tools. You will have to build what you want from there.
  • Broken or dirty data – Power BI relies on relationships between different tables and inputs to build the model. If a piece of information is missing and if that is the connection in the model, it will skip that line. This has resulted in expectations not meeting what was displayed.
  • Know your data story – Power BI does not do data interpretation. You need to know what you want to tell. This is one of the main issues on the final display of information.
  • Permissions – Our shared spreadsheets and the dashboard were stored in places where we didn’t have full access to use. Arrange the files so each input has the right permissions to do SharePoint integration.

How do you get started?

But what about the fish?

The most important thing to remember is to be creative and have fun with your data!  

Power BI: Number of students seen per School using the Enlighten Aquarium visual. Enlighten Aquarium won a people’s choice award for the ‘Power BI Best Visual’ contest in 2016.

Creating interactive content with H5P

By Marianne Sato, Digital Content Specialist, University of Queensland Library, m.sato@library.uq.edu.au

What is H5P?

H5P is an open-source, online tool for creating and sharing interactive content that can be embedded into different platforms. You can use H5P to create engaging content using a range of multimedia and interactivity. At the University of Queensland Library, H5P had all the features we wanted for creating learning objects: 

Checklist icon
  • Easy to embed and reuse
  • Accessible
  • Flexible – able to chunk content into sections and add a range of formats
  • Allows the inclusion of interactive elements to increase engagement
  • Trackable – response data can be tracked in the Learning Management System (LMS).

Checklist icon by Popcorn Arts on the Noun Project.

The interactivity in H5P helps to increase engagement with the content and retention of key information and allows for immediate feedback to learner’s responses. You can use it to assess student learning or to gather response data to learn more about students’ understanding of the content. You can enable a Confusion Indicator in the H5P content to: 

  • know what areas students may be having trouble understanding. 
  • improve content to address areas of difficulty.

We also link to a feedback form in our learning objects as an additional method for gathering feedback to help improve our content. 

Using H5P

First time users of H5P may feel a bit overwhelmed by all the different options but once you experiment a bit and try things out it will soon seem easy.  We recommend downloading some examples as it allows you to see which parts in the edit view match the public view. H5P.org has tutorials for the different content types. All H5P content types are open-source and shared on H5P.org. These are some examples of content types that we use at the University of Queensland: 

Accessibility

Content types recommendations by H5P.com lists the accessibility of different content types and other limitations. Meeting accessibility requirements also depends on the content you add to your object. For example, images must be sufficiently described in alt text and captions and video should have captions and transcripts. 

Sharing H5P content

H5P content can be:

  • Cloned or copied within a platform. This makes it easy to adapt the content for different audiences. 
  • Downloaded from one platform and imported into another (if the user makes it available for others to use). This is great for creating Open Educational Resources. Look out for a Reuse option on the H5P object. 

Access to H5P

H5P content can be added to any publishing platform that allows embedded content. Users can choose to pay for a hosting and support service or host the content themselves. H5P.com provides a paid hosting and support service for:

  • Direct link or embed – You create and store your content on H5P.com and link or embed it in your publishing platform. 
  • H5P via Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) – You can integrate your H5P content with your LMS, including Blackboard, Canvas and Moodle. 

The LTI integration for your LMS provides reports on activity completion and learner responses (depending on the content type). It can also be linked with the LMS Grade system.

Users can self-host H5P content and use free plugins for Drupal, WordPress and Moodle. Institutionally-provided Pressbooks publishing networks also have a H5P plug-in.

Limitations of H5P

While many things are great about H5P it does have some limitations:

  • It is difficult to get response data without an LTI. Having a feedback form helps to gather some data from users and the Confusion Indicator will return anonymous responses. 
  • The cloning procedure for adding H5P content to the LMS means that many different versions of the content exist. We try to ensure we are added as collaborators to each cloned version of the object and to keep a record of where our H5P objects are used so that we can inform users of updates. 

Try our H5P crossword!

Direct link to the H5P Crossword.

Images used in the crossword

Stretching my digital dexterity through ECU Library Digital and Information Literacy

By Liz Grzyb (MEd student, Charles Sturt University)

As part of my study for the MEd (Teacher Librarianship) course online at Charles Sturt University, I was required to complete a Professional Work Placement at a library. I am already working in a high school library, so I approached the Edith Cowan University (ECU) Library as I was interested in seeing the differences between secondary and tertiary/academic libraries.

I was lucky enough to be teamed up with the delightful Danielle Degiorgio in Digital & Information Literacy (DIL), as I had identified digital services and information literacy as some of the areas I would like to find out more about. My prac has been literally book-ended with Digital Dexterity – I began by sitting in on an online DigiDex meeting and it will end with this blog post!

During my time at the library, I have spent time talking with many experts on various different aspects of how the library is run. Many of these discussions were about information literacy (IL) and digital literacy (DL). IL in a university library has similarities to my experience in a school library, but it also has many more layers due to the variation in focus and intensive research needs of the users.

I had not realised until I arrived at ECU that the university is e-preferred, so I was surprised at the huge number of electronic resources the library facilitates, and how much digital literacy pre-loading was needed when introducing new students to the university. The Orientation Week workshops that are being planned cover introductions to many of the learning tools used by the university and the library will help to clear barriers to study. It is such an important service to ensure equity for students.

I have spent a lot of my working time this week looking into Open Educational Resources (OERs). Before this prac I did not know they were a ‘thing’, but I have found out that they are incredibly important for equity in education and life-long learning. I have unearthed a number of new-to-me databases and providers of open resources specifically for assisting learning or for information-gathering. I can see that this process will help me to support teaching staff at my school as well as expanding my own teaching strategies.

The image depicts a younger and an older humanised notebooks sitting on a bench. The older notebook has a cane. Both notebooks are looking at a laptop the younger notebook is holding. The laptop says OER on it. There is also an empty thought bubble above the notebooks.
Image by Manfred Steger from Pixabay

If, like me, you have not used OERs much before, here are a few places you might start investigating resources for your area:

Many of the OER databases are weighted to overseas resources, so it is wonderful to see that the DigiDex educators have a group bringing home-grown resources to the table. (https://www.oercommons.org/groups/digital-dexterity-educators/5554/)

The DIL team have been wonderful to spend my placement with, and I thank them profusely for their generosity in helping me to gain experience in their area of knowledge. Everyone I spoke with at DIL had amazing dedication to information and digital literacy for students – they were focused on providing workshops, services, and resources accessible to all. I have lots of new ideas to spring on my unsuspecting colleagues and students this year!

Open for everyone – our new living digital book

By the GitBook team (Blair Kelly, Bryony Hawthorn, Emma Chapman, Jasmine Castellano, Katie Mills, Karen Miller, Leah Gustafson, Miah de Francesch, Nica Tsakmakis, Ruth Cameron, Sara King, and Wendy Ratcliffe)


In keeping with the ideas of digital creation, innovation, and problem solving, we are excited to announce the launch of ‘The Living Book of Digital Skills (You never knew you needed until now)’: a living, open-source online guide to ‘modern not-quite-technical computer skills’ for researchers, library staff, and the broader academic community.

A collaboration between Australia’s Academic Research Network (AARNet) and the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL), this book is the creation of the CAUL Digital Dexterity Champions and their communities.

The Digital Skills GitBook is an open-source project and we are now open for contributions. Our vision for the book is that it is made by everyone, for everyone. We want it to be accessible to both amateurs and professionals, creators and users. For this reason, we are keen for the entire community to contribute to the creation of this resource as a way to build our collective capacity to support academics and library staff working in this space.

The GitBook team has worked together to create the chapter outline, a code of conduct, instructions for contributors, and a copyright statement. We are now seeking content  at three skill levels (Developing, Skilled and Adept) from our communities. A contribution doesn’t have to be complex, as you can see from the example topics listed below, and you can choose to submit parts of a topic too:

  • How to create a directory structure
  • Naming and organising files/folders
  • ISO dates
  • Readme files
  • Using password managers
  • Markdown
  • Git and GitHub
  • Screen casting
  • Managing collections

Here is a sample article. The text should be simple and accessible to everyone, with as little jargon as possible, or where there is specialist language this should be explained and can be added to the glossary.

Take a look at our requested articles page. Could you write an article on any of these topics? Do you see any topics we have missed? If the answer to either of these questions is yes, then please use one of the following options to contribute content or topic suggestions (choose from 1 or 2):

  1. Sign up to GitHub and use our contributor form. If you don’t have a GitHub account, use these instructions to set one up; or
  2. Connect with us on Slack

For more information about copyright, please see our Copyright Statement.  also encourage you to circulate this within your own networks and approach expert colleagues who may have their own skills to contribute.

Thank you for helping our GitBook come alive, we can’t wait to hear from you!


Ko wai au? Who am I? Digital Identity for a career librarian

By Kim Tairi, University Librarian, Auckland University of Technology. Contact: kim.tairi@aut.ac.nz or on Twitter and Instagram

Know your Why

Image of Kim Tairi

As a career librarian I have always been an advocate for using social media to build robust and diverse professional and personal learning networks. I like to think of the networks that I belong to as circles of kindness and reciprocity.

This is my why. I use social media to learn, share and be part of communities of practice that are active in education, libraries, indigenisation and decolonisation and other issues I consider important.

Many of the people I have met virtually have gone on to become friends in real life. I am fortunate.

Private versus Open 

I use my own name and have an open account. I rarely get trolled and if I do, my number 1 rule is don’t engage. You owe trolls nothing and you have every right to block with wild abandon. 

My digital identity, that is, all the digital content that I have created and I am connected with, has grown organically. As an experiential learner, I like to play, make mistakes, try things and see what happens. This has led to some wonderful opportunities – conference papers, book chapters, speaking gigs and meeting incredible people.  

Twice, I have been asked to consider deleting a post by a workplace. However, I have never received an ultimatum to take-down content, it has always been a conversation. In both cases I chose to delete the contested content.  

I am always mindful that even with disclaimers about content and posts not being those of my employers, I am by reputation, associated with my place of work. If you are active on social media platforms, it is good practice to know your workplace social media policy and, recognise that your employer may look at the content you create with a different lens than you. 

Social media is performative  

As a senior leader in our profession, I acknowledge that I am always expected to display professionalism in public forums. I don’t always get it right but I try to be genuine, engaging, kind, creative, stylish and visible as an indigenous, intersectional feminist. I curate my content but try to be me at the same time.  

Social media is a performative space: for example my online persona is an extrovert and tall. I am not. That is why I call myself 1.58m of Awesomeness on Twitter! 

Actively manage your content  

Set up Google alerts and Google yourself regularly. This will enable you to check your digital footprint. Finally, be intentional, mindful and respectful and social media will serve you well professionally.  

You can find me online on Twitter and Instagram. Say kia ora!  

Eight essential elements of digital literacy

By Professor Jo Coldwell-Neilson is an ALT Fellow and Associate Dean, Teaching & Learning, Faculty of Science, Engineering & Built Environment, Deakin University jo.coldwell@deakin.edu.au

Article first posted in Campus Morning Mail , May 2nd 2021 – reposted with permission.

Digital literacy needs to grow and be nurtured. It needs to be scaffolded through learning. And, ultimately, it needs to be fit-for-purpose

As society responds to the impact of Industry 4.0, the need to have sound digital literacy skills, and the confidence to grow them, has become an essential professional skill for all graduates.

Students need to develop a digital mind-set, regardless of what direction their careers take. This involves being flexible and adaptable, particularly in the context of using digital technologies to support their learning, – technologies which will continue to change and develop.

Digital literacy needs to grow and be nurtured. It needs to be scaffolded through learning. And, ultimately, it needs to be fit-for-purpose. Importantly, it is a mindset and an attitude, not just a skill set. Improving digital capabilities is enabled through ongoing, contextualised, digital literacy development activities that are integrated into discipline learning.

Essential elements of a modern understanding of digital literacy include

  • an understanding of how digital technologies work;
  • confidence in using these technologies;
  • the agility and flexibility to engage with and negotiate a rapidly changing digital environment
  • skills to understand the modern media world to enable critical engagement with the environment
  • skills to recognise when information may not be reliable at best or fake at worst
  • skills and capabilities to be a responsible digital global citizen
  • skills in ethical judgement about emerging dilemmas arising from digitally mediated interactions in the digital world; and
  • skills and capabilities to harness the power of digital technology for the betterment of self, community, and the world we live in.

In other words:

Digital literacy is the ability to identify and use technology confidently, creatively, and critically to effectively meet the demands and challenges of living, learning, and working in a digital society.


Jo’s website, Decoding Digital Literacy, provides information about digital literacy and links to publications produced through the Fellowship work.

ALTF 2019 Legacy Report is here