Digital Literacy in Higher Education

As part of the ongoing reexamination of our curriculum and approaches, my department has been working on the goals for our major, on what we hope students will have learned by the time they graduate.

We discussed writing and speaking skills, knowledge acquisition and critical thinking, familiarity with a diverse set of methodologies, times, and places, and a perspective on the place of the self in the larger society. Although not always expressed in such ways before by us, these are fairly common sentiments in history departments. What was unusual was the addition of a section on what we're calling "digital literacy." Here's what we came up with:

• As the amount of information available online increases at near-exponential levels, the need for students’ digital literacy grows as well.
• The ability to find reliable, scholarly, information on a topic
• Within gated, subscription databases and in the larger, disorganized online world
• Finding and searching the collections of online archives, museums and institutions of higher education
• The ability to assess and evaluate the reliability of online sources
• This is a new facet of the approach historians and history students have long employed, that of judicious skepticism.
• The ability to produce creative, yet scholarly materials for the digital world
• These require the same level of rigor applied to traditional papers and presentations.

What have we left out? Probably something about encouraging active participation in an online world (hat-tip to Jerry on this), though I'm still working on ways to write that section. Other suggestions?


We decided the following was what we wanted for our students:

Students who become fluent in all these areas will be adaptable, reflective consumers and producers of information, critical thinkers able to take on any number of occupations, aware of the diversity of thought and opinion in the study of the past, and ready to move forward into the larger world as responsible, productive citizens of local and global communities.

None of this is finished yet (and we still are in the midst of curricular discussions), but I can't help but be excited about the direction the department and the institution is taking. We are looking to the future in useful ways, for us as teachers/mentors/learners and for our students as learners/mentees/teachers.