Introduction to #DLFteach Toolkit Volume 4: Critical Digital Literacies

#DLFteach Toolkits are open-access collections of peer-reviewed lesson plans and instructional strategies, designed for information professionals and faculty partners. 

With a thematic focus on critical digital literacies, Volume 4 of the Toolkit offers adaptable lesson plans and learning objects that help learners develop the skills necessary to consume and create information in a digital landscape, as well as the habits of mind necessary to understand and critique information systems and their underlying power structures. It encourages both skills-based outcomes and contextual thinking, making clear the inequities and structural biases of many digital tools. 

Instructors using the Toolkit will learn strategies for promoting inclusivity, accessibility, and digital pedagogy in their teaching practices, helping learners engage thoughtfully with emerging technologies and enact strategies to correct inequities of use and impact.

The eight lessons in Volume 4 address several key topics in critical digital literacies, representing contributions from a diverse range of professional and disciplinary backgrounds. Artificial intelligence is examined throughout the Toolkit, taking prominence in Beth Carpenter’s The Robots Are Helpful: Using Generative AI With Undergraduates, which prompts students to use generative AI to think through topic development and research planning. Similarly, in her credit-bearing, full-term course Navigating Biases in AI Algorithms, Seul Lee teaches strategies for critically evaluating and ethically using generative AI tools. 

Critical visual and multimedia literacies are encouraged in lessons by Madonna Vas Rodrigues, Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth, and Trent Wintermeier. Vas Rodrigues’s Integrating ArcGIS Online with Microsoft Excel teaches learners to analyze geographic data, emphasizing ethical data visualization and understanding bias. Bursztajn-Illingworth and Wintermeier’s Building Digital Exhibits of Annotated Audiovisual Artifacts with AVAnnotate encourages learners to employ open-access resources to engage archival materials that are typically underrepresented in traditional repositories .

Sarah Hartman-Caverly’s workshop lessons Private Bits: Privacy, Intimacy, and Consent and Hidden Layer: Intellectual Privacy and Generative AI respectively deploy queer and feminist digital literacies to interrogate the digital intermediaries that impact intimate relationships in an online environment, and introduce learners to key generative AI concepts through a privacy lens.

Inherent bias in the structure, accessibility, and analysis of large data sets is explored in both Alexandra Provo and Nicole Helregel’s Open Knowledge Graphs: See How They SPARQL, and Janet Swatscheno and Felix Oke’s Context Matters: An Introduction to HathiTrust Research Center Tools for Text Analysis. Provo and Helregel’s lesson exposes learners to the underpinnings of big open data systems encountered in day-to-day life, revealing data set structures and providing opportunities to edit them. Particular attention is paid to missing data, encouraging learners to train their critical eye. Swatscheno and Oke’s lesson develops learners’ foundational text analysis skills, considering the ethics of mass digitization and calling attention to structural biases in common tools and algorithms.

How to Use the Toolkit

The Toolkit contributions are designed for adaptation by instructors and students with a range of technological fluency, including novice learners. Each lesson includes learning outcomes, intended audience, the lesson’s curricular context, a step-by-step delivery outline, assessment strategies, and suggestions for adaptation.

We encourage Toolkit users to adapt the content for their own specific classroom contexts, and share adapted lessons with their professional communities. 

Licensing Information

Unless otherwise noted, all lessons are covered by a Creative Commons CC-BY license. CC-BY enables users to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the lesson, so long as attribution is given to the creator. 

Editorial Team

Volume 4 Editors

Ashley Peterson, Mackenzie Salisbury, and Alexandra Solodkaya

Peer Reviewers

A condition of inclusion in Volume 4 was peer review; each Toolkit contributor reviewed a lesson by a fellow-author.

The following people provided an additional review round for each lesson:

• Kelsey Brown

• Theresa Burress

• Shelby Hallman

• Alex O’Keefe

• Kaetlyn Phillips

• Maggie Tarmey

Acknowledgements

#DLFteach Toolkit Volume 4: Critical Digital Literacies was a true group effort. In addition to the stellar team of lesson authors and reviewers, the editors would like to sincerely thank:

• The Digital Library Federation (DLF), the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the initial funding that laid the groundwork for the ongoing development of the #DLFteach Toolkits.

• Toolkit Volume 3 editors Mackenzie Brooks and Melanie Hubbard for their excellent, inspirational work and initial guidance.

• The #DLFteach group, especially Alex Wermer-Colan, Hillary H. Richardson, and Kayla Abner, for their support and advice throughout the process.

• Wayne Graham, for copy editing the Toolkit.