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HOBBS KEYNOTES AT AMICAL 2021

AMICAL is an international consortium of 28 American‐modeled institutions in 20 different countries. It is a cooperative organization for advancing learning, teaching and research through the collaborative development of library, technology and curricular resources at member institutions. AMICAL’s membership is composed almost entirely of non‐profit US‐accredited colleges and universities, following American models in their curricular organization and their staff’s professional environment, but located in Europe, Central and Southern Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Their liberal arts educational missions and pedagogy distinguish them from local institutions, and their staff and faculty are generally well connected with colleagues from international scholarly and professional communities. They are often seen as leading or innovative institutions in their respective countries.

Create to Learn: Advancing Collaboration and Creativity with Digital Texts, Tools and Technologies
Academic librarians, technologists, and higher education faculty have been actively experimenting with new forms of digital learning during the global pandemic. In the process, they have discovered some valuable strategies and practices that will continue to fuel innovation in teaching, learning, and scholarship for years to come. In this session, we’ll discuss why it’s more important than ever before to have complicated conversations about all the literacies - information, media, news, digital, critical, and those that are yet to be named. How do these competencies get integrated into all programs and courses across the liberal arts and sciences? In this session, we’ll take time to experiment, working in small groups, using create-to-learn pedagogies that can provoke intellectual curiosity by combining play and learning. Then, we’ll reflect on how creative collaboration can offer a liberating way to open up spaces of possibility and adaptation for the stakeholders in our own institutions and communities.

 

Renee Hobbs is an expert in digital and media literacy education and she is the author of Mind Over Media: Propaganda Education for a Digital Age, which was awarded the 2021 PROSE Award for Excellence in Social Sciences from the Association of American Publishers. As professor of communication studies and director of the Media Education Lab, she co-directs the Graduate Certificate in Digital Literacy at the University of Rhode Island. She has published 12 books and over 150 scholarly and professional articles and developed multimedia learning resources for elementary, secondary and college teachers.  

Learn more about the conference here. Here are some of the questions that will be explored: 

  • How can we improve student engagement in hybrid and blended environments, which we’ll increasingly be working with even after the pandemic?
  • What role can we play in contributing to well being – our own and that of students – in this more digitally intermediated world?
  • What are the dimensions and measures of digital literacy in our rapidly changing digital universe – and how can we design our courses, and our learning resources, to make meaningful progress along those dimensions?
  • How can we gather – or create! – free and open course materials that reflect our own unique curricula and learning environments?
  • How can we develop library resources and learning technologies that build both on what we know from the scholarship of teaching, learning and libraries, and on data about our own students’ and faculty’s experiences with our resources?
  • What roles can libraries, technology or digital pedagogy and scholarship play in ensuring diversity, equity and inclusion in our teaching, learning and working environments?