Developing Faculty Skills

My session idea is related to Ian’s, I think, though I’m coming at the questions from a faculty development angle.

If we’re to integrate digital literacy and skills into the curriculum, faculty need to be equipped to do so—yet many of them aren’t so equipped. So I’d like to talk about a number of questions:

(1) What digital skills do we want our students to have? That may be a starting point for what skills faculty should have. (Interested faculty, that is. It probably isn’t necessary for all faculty to be involved in developing students’ digital skills and literacy.)

(2) Some faculty may be interested in developing their own digital skills for use in their research as well as in their teaching. That likely means they’ll be engaged in a fair amount of exploration and experimentation. So, what skills do faculty need in order to:

• discover appropriate digital tools for the work they want to do, whether in the classroom or as part of their research?
• develop facility in using the tools they discover?
• be sufficiently sure of their own computing skills that they can confidently experiment without worrying that they’ll (a) break their computers or (b) cause headaches for colleagues in IT?