Building digital literacy through exploration and curation of emerging technologies

People readily consume an ever-growing range of emerging technologies while largely unaware of their lack of control over the impact that such networking, devices, data, and processes have on their lives. Since college-educated people are huge consumers of digital products and are expected to participate in networked learning, it is critical to foster student development of an expanded understanding of digital literacy. To address this challenge, we have created instructional materials for instructor and student use of the internationally known repository, “Fabric” of Digital Life (https://fabricofdigitallife.com/). This research comes as the result of collaboration between the University of Minnesota’s Emerging Technology Research Collaboratory (ETRC, https://etrc.umn.edu/), a research group for investigating emerging technologies, and Fabric of Digital Life (https://fabricofdigitallife.com/) and its affiliated Decimal Research Lab at Ontario Tech University. Together, functioning as a collaborative in support of networked learning, we invite and facilitate research on building student digital literacy through examination, contribution, and/or curation of collections regarding emerging technologies. From Spring 2019 to the present, 13 instructors and associated students across nine institutions have developed and are using a set of instructional materials for student exploration and/or curation of collections in this repository. This paper documents initial instructor discussion and study of student development of digital literacy as a result of use and/or curation of Fabric collections on emerging technologies and the discourses surrounding them. We are beginning to study the abilities that students draw upon when exploring the collections and when determining which artifacts might be included in current collections as well as new collections that might be developed. Collaborative interaction with the editorial team at Ontario Tech University not only enhanced the repository content and development of instructional resources, it also further evolved the metadata for Fabric for external users and the public. At its core, this research examines the potential development of digital literacy through the act of exploring and curating collections on emerging technologies. Critical to this core is the networked learning collaborative in place to foster and support this work.