Experiential and exponential learning to build digital dexterity
Our ways of working have needed to diversify as pandemic impacts continue to rock our world. Digital participation is now core to the GLAMR sector modes of practice. Navigating digital spaces and platforms is an embedded part of work life, regardless of whether your role is focused on team engagement, project flow, connecting to stakeholders, exhibitions, teaching and learning, collection management or a multitude of other GLAMR areas. To thrive in our current work ecosystems, to be active participants, the cultivation and evolution of digital dexterity is now critical. What has emerged as a sector wide challenge is how do we build this digital dexterity and enable widespread learning with sociological change in our work communities? More than this, how do we do this and still respond to the diversity of learning needs and communication preferences? This submission proposes to delve into these questions by shaping an experiential workshop that focuses on the role of communication and shared learning in developing digital dexterity skills. Using experiential learning and the concepts of exponential learning as a stimulus, the workshop will group participants into project teams that will respond to a collaborative design challenge of creating a digital wellbeing resource. What will diversify in the design challenge is that project teams will be split into digital, non-digital, and blended-streams. Additionally, different constraints will be experienced by the project teams as wildcard moments (such as communication barriers, technical difficulties, change of platforms or redeployment of team members) are added during the team project time. The workshop will initially ground participants in exponential learning theory and design thinking approaches. Each project team will then be supported through the design thinking stages by either in-person or digital facilitators. The culmination of the workshop day will involve project team sharing with broader community a rough prototype of their digital wellbeing resource. As part of encouraging reflective practice and building our understanding of exponential learning in work teams, participants will be encouraged to anonymously share on a digital whiteboard or post in physical feedback boxes any frustrations, joys, learnings or threshold moments experienced throughout the workshop. Finally, this workshop will be facilitated by CAUL’s Digital Dexterity Champions and intends to stimulate participant engagement across a diversity of digital dexterity areas. The facilitators will share their lived experience of learning within a community of practice, where digital dexterity is seen as an exponential domain. The facilitators will also explicitly position this workshop design as an outcome from a group culture that fosters innovation and experimentation, highlighting how exponential learning emerges from collaborative discussion, shared learnings, and co-ideation.