Digital Literacy Centre

News

20 April 2009

The Digital Literacy Centre is pleased to offer its support to LLED 301 (Language across the Curriculum in Multilingual Classrooms: Secondary) this summer, offering workshops during its semester in Pon F103 in some of the key relevant new media tools and applications that are currently having an impact on literacy and education. The DLC team is collaborating with LLED 301 coordinators to deliver this support.

8 April 2009

The Digital Literacy Centre has established its schedule for its first Summer Institute this coming July. This Institute offers an ideal opportunity for graduate students to immerse themselves in questions of digital literacy over a three-week period. The institute is comprised of two morning graduate course offerings and an afternoon workshop series that may be taken for graduate credit. Our visiting summer scholar is digital humanist and Professor of Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Michael Eberle-Sinatra. We will also be joined by John Willinsky, U Stanford, Teresa Dobson (UBC, Director of the DLC), and Stan Ruecker, U Alberta.  You can check the tab “Summer Institute” for more details.

We are also running a set of workshops following the Institute examining the affordances of social media in the classroom. Details about the workshops may be found at the website for External Programs and Learning Technologies (EPLT).

This month features the last in the CCFI Noted Scholar Lecture Mini-Series, “Virtually McLuhan: Theorizing Code and Digital Life,” featuring Dr. Kate O’Riordan from  the University of Sussex. The title of her talk is “Encoding Digital Publics.”  And we continue to offer workshops to Faculty, Students and Staff in LLED to help them develop their digital literacy. The series is co-sponsored by the Digital Literacy Centre. Please check our Events page for all the details.

We invite you to come visit the Centre on the UBC campus, Ponderosa F103, and to contribute to this blog by posting your comments in response to our weekly topics.

DLC coordinator

7 March 2009

Renovations are complete and we are getting underway with fulfilling our mandate of offering consultation, disseminating information, and providing training and instructional support in the area of digital literacy, with a particular focus on supporting the work of those teaching and researching in language, literacy and literary education.

This month we are running a very busy and diverse schedule of events, as the listings under the events tab demonstrate. We are co-sponsoring a speaker series (Virtually McLuhan) that is drawing great interest across campus. The second lecture in this series will take place in the Digital Literacy Centre on Thursday, 12 March, at noon. If the first session was any indication, this event is sure to be full, so come early if you plan to attend. We are also hosting media theorist jan jagodzinski, Professor of Secondary Education, University of Alberta, who will give a talk entitled “Media Culture and Psychoanalysis” at 2:00 pm on 31 March. His talk is co-sponsored by the DLC, the Centre for Cross-Faculty Inquiry, and the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy. Additionally, we are excited to co-sponsor a “director in attendance” screening of the film Examined Life on 26 March with the Centre for Cross-Faculty Inquiry and others. More information about this event will be posted on our blog shortly.

Beyond speaker events, we are offering several workshops this month. On 4 March 2009 we hosted GTAs from the Department of English for a workshop on MediaWiki. This workshop, given by Teresa Dobson with the assistance of DLC staff, followed a lecture given at the Department of English by Teresa Dobson and Jeff Miller, “The Affordances of Social Media for Teaching and Learning.” The series was very well received by participants and we look forward to future collaborations with the Department of English. Upcoming workshops in March include two sessions on digital video editing that will be offered by DLC staff, Jaime Beck and Graham Lea (see the events tab for more information).

Finally, we have posted preliminary information about our Digital Literacy Centre Summer Institute (see the Summer Institute tab), which we will update in the next weeks on a regular basis. This Institute offers an ideal opportunity for graduate students to immerse themselves in questions of digital literacy over a three-week period. The institute is comprised of two morning graduate course offerings, an afternoon workshop series that may be taken for graduate credit, and a week of workshops for practicing teachers. Our visiting summer scholar is digital humanist and Professor of Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Michael Eberle-Sinatra. We will also be joined by John Willinsky, U Stanford, and Stan Ruecker, U Alberta.

The Digital Literacy Centre now has regular access hours, during which the space may be used as a Learning Commons (that is, for quiet small-group work, individual study, consultations with DLC staff, accessing of print and digital resources, and so on). These hours, which are usually 11:30-1:30, Monday through Thursday, are posted on the DLC door and will be published on this site in the near future.

We invite you to come visit the Centre on the UBC campus, Ponderosa F103, and to contribute to this blog by posting your comments in response to our weekly topics.

Dr. Teresa Dobson
Director, Digital Literacy Centre
Associate Professor of Language and Literacy Education