I spent the last two days with projects and associations from the JISC Digital LIteracies Programme at Birmingham, beside the Tony Hancock Roundabout.

Sheila MacNeil offered a Storify account of Day 1 and here’s a link to a session I ran on Digital Literacy issues for Senior management, which got quite a few re-tweets for the right or wrong reasons!

Day 2 has been a gathering of the Professional Associations involved. This is a radical move for JISC and something that’s really paying dividends and has only just got started.

Here’s the agenda for the day along with the PPT stack and a Storify from Bex Lewis

I opened the day highlighting the @GuardianTech Digital Literacy in HE Tweet from yesterday publicising an article by Josie Fraser and Helen Beetham based on JISC work and wider

Aims of the day

 To help Associations progress their deliverables
 To move to action between KSEs
 To catalyse content on their Design Studio pages
 To identify opportunities for extra funding
 To agree the next KSE

1. Plenary: Experiences from those Associations having attended the Project Support Day and issues arising

SCONUL, HEDG, Vitae, Meriel Box and Andy(working with Helen) described how beneficial day 1 was. Associations found that Projects and their constituents were unfamiliar with the remit of Associations and that addressing this was mutually beneficial. The next KSE ‘market place’ theme will offer an opportunity to address this.

Exploring links between Projects and Associations
Carole Baume described how projects have their own networks that they would be prepared to use to highlight the benefits and offer Associations can bring, yet projects are unaware of Association remits. There is a need for associations to provide hooks into projects and Critical friends ask that associations provide material so they can air this with projects at the cluster meetings (Doug will add these to the Programme Google Calendar).
Conversely Associations might think of their networks and events in terms of project needs and invite projects along to these (having targeted agenda items to suit their needs).
Paul Bailey suggests webinars could be explored as a method of bridging between projects and associations and asked that associations might work together to offer webinars as offers to projects but inviting a wider audience
Doug outlined an offer to use the JISC Webinar system for free as part of the programme for events to members, projects but also that they are available for ‘internal’ meetings.
Helen ran a session called digital literacies in the disciplines. Asking how bridges are built between digital literacy needs / skills staff and what is delivered in the curriculum
Malcolm described a session run by Aaron Porter on the accreditation and recognition of students as change agents. A national accreditation to recognize student engagement beyond their programme of study would be of interest. It is likely that a social network to support this will be developed.

Afternote – Myles ran a session on Digital Literacy for Senior Management and live mind mapped the session

We aired a number of Association Project short videos and asked that Associations consider generating more of these to help bridge that gap.

2. Helen Beetham used these Digital Literacy Themes to identify shared problem spaces, while Alison MacKenzie ran a follow on session to identify resources, expertise and knowledge as well as gaps in provision

3. Lightning Talks

Projects took the knowledge and conversations from the earlier part of the day and made pitches to the wider group for extra funding (should this become available) to undertake collaborative activities to address the issues and gaps. These were captured as video.

4. UK Professional Standards Framework (UKPSF) Carole Baume

Carole described an initiative to help the developers of staff development programmes or Post Graduate Certificate who may not be highly digitally literate, to identify case study content to promote said literacies in the courses. Of the 4 levels of UKPSF deployment the proposal will address the first 3. The output will be a wiki signposting teh case studies. David Baume is asking associations to provide case studies to populate the wiki. If these are not yet written up he asks for a call and will write up and submit for associations.

Associations were asked to join a peer and begin to identify material to assist.

5. Close and way forward

The day was closed with a call to arms.

Andy Wilson of SDF suggested that we set up a ‘Small Ads‘ page where Associations and Projects could post issues and problems to be solved along with corresponding expertise, resources and knowledge.
There was a consensus that the next KSE event should be a joint one with the projects and be based on a ‘market place’ scenario to continue to map solutions to problems and facilitate the two way conversation between projects and their HEIs with the various professional associations.
Associations felt that an interim Webinar should be held to begin that process.

All in all we had some very positive comments about the day, the facilitators did a great job and our Association members participated fully and seemed to get a good deal from the event.

We’re looking forward to seeing the Association resources develop on their Design Studio pages