I recently attended the CPD25 event, CPD and learning technology: skills for librarians to support information and digital literacy. I was interested in how the role of the librarian intersects with learning technologies and in getting new ideas for how learning technologies could be applied to delivering information literacy teaching.
The speakers, Elizabeth Charles and Leo Havemann were both from Birkbeck. They were very knowledgeable and I found the session engaging.
The Association for Learning Technology (ALT) define learning technology as:
… the broad range of communication, information and related technologies that can be used to support learning, teaching and assessment. Our community is made up of people who are actively involved in understanding, managing, researching, supporting or enabling learning with the use of Learning Technology (Association for Learning Technology, 2018).1
As librarians, we are supporting learning and teaching and use a range of technologies to do so – therefore learning technology is definitely not just for academics and students.
It was highlighted that there has been a shift from talking about digital literacy to digital capabilities, for example Jisc’s building digital capability project. There was also a brief discussion on the terms digital natives and immigrants versus digital visitors and residents.
We then had five minutes to try the V and R mapping process ourselves. I was interested to note that I had definitely moved away from resident and towards visitor with Facebook. We also had the opportunity to learn about a digital resource that the person next to us uses. I had not heard of Lynda.com before, which is a site where you can learn how to use Photoshop, Word etc.
The speakers gave advice and tips on how to start incorporating learning technologies and, as a result, I made this video.
The session finished with each of us writing down one or two actions we would take after attending the event. We then had to put our name and email address on the back and swap with the person next to us, who will email us in one month to check how we are getting on. This not only makes it more likely we will follow up on our actions but adds one person to our network!
1Association for Learning Technology (2018) What is learning technology? Available at: https://www.alt.ac.uk/about-alt/what-learning-technology (Accessed : 16 May 2018).