The Digital Literacy Imperative

Curator: Ann Hill Duin, University of Minnesota

Being digitally literate implies the ability to make ethically informed choices and decisions about one’s digital behavior; i.e., to understand one’s digital identity, property, rights, and safety. By increasing digital literacy, we make society more resilient and less able to be hacked.

People embrace emerging technologies amid the lure of efficiency and the compulsion to connect with self-tracking and like-minded data. In academia, “smart writers” assist with academic writing; artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbots tutor students; analytics tools predict student performance; and augmented and virtual reality devices amplify performance and extend intelligence. As massive amounts of data are collected, mined, and used to alter human behavior, students / instructors / all users of technology face a digital literacy crisis: we readily consume an ever-growing range of immersive technologies while remaining largely unaware of our lack of control over the impact such devices and processes have on their lives.

To address this challenge, The Digital Literacy Imperative collection will include resources for use in developing instructional resources for positioning college students to manage their digital behavior and identity. This collection will have four sub collections documenting the discourse surrounding the potential and peril of artificial intelligence, analytic tools, AR and VR technologies as they relate to expanding and managing one’s digital literacy.