#ALTC2013: Abstract Accepted: Slow & Steady Wins The Race: Developing Digital Literacies

Organisational Developers (OD) within HE have responsibility for supporting organisational-level development within their institutions. Senior members are involved with strategic-level decision making on organisational initiatives such as restructuring the institution, managing change, or introducing new policies and therefore can have direct impact upon enabling or disabling opportunities for enhancing teaching and learning, including with digital technologies.

Anecdotal evidence suggested that many OD practitioners are not comfortable with digital literacies, leading to opportunities for the effective use of digital technologies to be missed or under-promoted, with a consequent detrimental impact on opportunities to facilitate new cultures of learning. Working with the Organisational Development in Higher Education Group (ODHEG) over the past two years, the anecdotal evidence has proved all too true. This presentation gives an insight into working with a group in which a significant number are unconvinced by the benefits that technology can bring to their working lives, or the wider learning culture. The author, supported by JISC funding, has sought to help the group gain confidence with digital literacies through a series of mostly face-to-face engagements, starting to incorporate some online materials.

This presentation gives an insight into the processes of slowly and steadily encouraging the group to take a more positive view of digital literacies, which may help others working with resistant learners. The tide started to turn as the group grew to understand the impact that digital technologies could have upon their work role, with mobile devices and apps that supported logistics, connections via Linked In, and over half the group voluntarily attending a session on Twitter. We have now reached the stage where the group is being encouraged to embrace the idea of sharing their expertise through digital technologies, and anticipate that the group will, in the longer term, be able to contribute much more effectively to organisational take-up of digital literacy initiatives.

Tags: DigitalLiteracies, Change, OrganisationalDevelopment, SeniorManagers, Attitude, LearnersInControl