Digital Footprints
Digital Footprints is a programme designed for students to engage with the World Wide Web in a variety of constructive contexts. With a focus on teaching essential digital literacy skills, it also seeds collaboration and encourages dialogue, which are intrinsic to enterprise development and research.
This programme is suitable for students in Secondary Schools, Higher Education and Further Education.
THE CONCEPT
With the ubiquity of interactive web 2.0 and social media resources, engaging with the web no longer involves writing tedious amounts of code. The Digital Footprints programme enables students to engage constructively with the WWW to develop their enterprise and research skills. In the process it embeds collaboration and encourages dialogue between the participants and their peer group.
THE FRAMEWORK
This programme is based on a series of workshops that cover different aspects of creating a web-presence. For example, effective use of keywords, developing a sitemap, using web 2.0 communication channels, team-work through social media and so on.
The workshops offer a hands on experience and students are encouraged to customize resources such as blogs, twitter profiles, mediawikis and so on. Along the way they are also able to reinforce technical skills such as image editing, HTML/CSS coding and writing search engine optimized content.
For example, students have worked collaboratively to create a web-presence for themselves as professionals, they have also developed products (e-zines, portals) for specific target audiences for the creative and tourism sectors.
A practical application of such skills in this way bolster students’ confidence. It will also enables them to harness the power of the www to realize their entrepreneurial ideas through creative problem solving.
WHO CAN PARTICIPATE?
Digital Footprints is aimed at students in Secondary Schools, as well as HE and FE Institutions across all disciplines. It is based on a flexible framework of workshops that can be adapted to fit within mainstream or extracurricular activities.
TRACK RECORD
The programme has been delivered at:
York St John Business School, 2009-2010
Audience: Undergraduate students – International Tourism Management
Outcome: Participants developed the York, The Inside Guide website to offer information and advice to visit York on a budget. They played a significant role in developing the conceptual framework for the website and generating search engine optimized content. The website uses a Wordpress Content Management System and students were given training on maintaining the site via the CMS.
Mount School York, 2009
Audience: Sixth form students
Outcome: Participants were given a practical introduction on using the internet as a research tool. The workshops covered a number of themes – from sourcing peer-reviewed content to avoiding plagiarism. Students applied these skills to create their end of year project.
Faculty of Arts – York St John University, 2009
Audience: Undergraduate students – Media Studies
Outcome: Participants across all three years of the Media Studies programme collaborated to develop a web-presence for a print-magazine published by the Faculty of Arts. The created the conceptual framework and developed content for for the website which was developed in Flash.
The Department of Music – University of York, 2005 – 2008
Audience: Postgraduate Students
Outcome: Participants created a web-presence to promote themselves as musicians. They were able to employ a variety of web 2.0 resources such as podcasts and blogs. Some students were also able to create personal websites using CSS.