 Thank you, everybody, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for coming out. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Thank you, thank you. Hello everyone, I'm Carlin. And I'm Shannon. And together we run a unit called the Digital Knowledge Center here at the University of Mary Washington. Our office is just upstairs. The Digital Knowledge Center is the unit that empowers students on our campus to be digital creators. That's right. Founded by our own Martha Burtis. Applause for Martha Burtis. Yes, yes, I'm part of that work is digital fluency of course, so we work with students so that they can consume and produce digital knowledge ethically, critically and responsibly. And to go with that is our patented program, Reclaim Digital Fluency. And we do this through three pathways which we call our tiers of engagement. That's right, the tiers of engagement. And our first tier is workshops. We give students a platform to share their knowledge with their fellow students. The second tier is fellowships. This is where students can take a deep dive into a passion project. And the final tier is jobs. We hire some students to help us do this work of empowering digital creators. And together these three tiers form the pyramid of digital fluency. That's right, our patented pyramid scheme of digital fluency. Actually, they're not tiers. It's not tiers at all. They're not tiers. They're really, they're more like, they're like prongs. Prongs, yes. The prongs of engagement. Prongs of engagement. Forming the trident of digital fluency. Yes. Yeah, lovely. Karlyn, why don't you tell us about Prong One? Sure. Let's take it prong by prong. Our first prong is workshops. Students come to us with an idea or a topic that they want to share with the community. Now, sometimes we do prime the prong a bit. We pick out some topics in advance, but usually people are bringing stuff to us. Yeah. We've had, we've had alumni bring us workshop topics. We've had our own student staff. And we've had students from all across the university in all different departments. Yeah. So after we get these proposals, the next step is the jam. This is like the secret sauce to just about everything we do. It's a highly collaborative process, but it's kind of more like this kind of jam. Yes. So we sit down with the students or more often we stand up in front of a whiteboard and we hammer out a framework for this workshop idea around the topic they're interested in. What's the next slide? Right. Okay. There we go. So once we jam thing, oh rehearsal, I think this is where I'm talking about. Yeah. So when we lead out in the weeks leading up to the workshop, we schedule rehearsal, which we try to do as much as possible in show conditions, right? We want them to use the slides they've designed, go through the hands-on activities they want as part of the workshop, and critically, do it in the space where the workshop is going to happen. Now, what I was supposed to say before Carlin talked about the rehearsal was, you know, when we get together and jam with students, we don't want workshop to feel like an assignment like they would have in a class. It's really the synergy between the students' knowledge around the topic and now our pedagogical know-how. But yes, then we move on to the rehearsal and then I'm going to skip right over back to that, back to me. So once we are done with the rehearsal, it's an opportunity for us to give students feedback about what we just saw, right? We can try the hands-on experiments that they might do and, of course, technical issues always arise. So you've got to work that stuff out before you let them lose. That's right. And then it's time for the show. We do a brief introduction to all the student workshops, but after that, students take the wheel. It's their show. They've done all this prep work. They run it themselves. Now, you may be wondering, how do I get people to come to workshops? Good news. It markets itself. It markets itself. With a tremendous amount of work on our part and our student staff, we put a lot of effort into the marketing, actually. Here's a little glimpse of our marketing task list. We put a lot of work into the marketing because the students put a lot of work into these workshops. And so we want to make sure we get, we make it worthwhile by getting eyes in front of them. Yes. Between us, our student marketing coordinator, our student workshop coordinator, we try to get the word out just about everywhere. Here's some of our lovely abs. You may be wondering, what are the benefits of a program like this? That is an excellent question, Carlin. So obviously the student body, they get to learn some new skills. They're learning from other students, and they get to connect other students that might be interested in the same things they're interested in. The presenter gets to share their passions, right? They get to get up and talk about what they love. And this is a recipe builder, something that they can point back to once they are done with Mary Washington, something that they did. Gosh, I sure love workshops, but we have two more prongs to get to. Carlin, why don't you tell them about Prong 2? Prong 2? Don't mind if I do. Prong 2 is fellowships. This is where we take a deeper dive into a passion project with a student over the course of a full semester. They submit an application, we review them, and then we meet for an initial meeting where we design a project contract. So this project contract contains the timeline, what are the parameters of the projects, and some deliverables that we'd like to see. Sometimes it's process documentation so other students can do what they did, or maybe we ask them to present at the research and creativity day that we have here at Mary Washington. That's right. Can we hammer out that project contract? At the end of the semester, the student delivers us a fabulous project. Easy as lion. Well, you're forgetting, Carlin, there's a few more steps between project contract and fabulous project. We do have to meet the students. We have to meet with them, and we have to meet with them, and we have to meet with them, and we meet with them again and again and again throughout the semester. That's true. We have found that even with our most responsible students, we have to have these regular meetings to make sure they're understanding what we're looking for and sticking to the project timelines that we've set out. That's correct. But after all that, then we do have fabulous projects. We're going to show you a little bit of some of what we've got. We had a student this past semester. She has crazy dreams and wanted to visualize them. So along with this, and you can actually see it on our media wall, you'll see the non-audio version kind of coming up every now and then. We made some process documentaries to talk about how did they go about doing this. So I'll put the audio mix. Uh-huh. Yeah. We've bludged out and made some media video. In this first video, I will be discussing my entire pre-process of how I've storyboard and how I do my shot list, et cetera. I designed the antagonists first because they are probably the most important design that I have. And then I moved on to the setting. And then I went back to the protagonists that we follow. Next up, there is filming and editing. We had another student who, over the course of the semester, designed and 3D printed their own practice bagpipe. So throughout the semester, they printed several disinversions. They did impact testing on their different designs. They had a number of failures. And then in the end, had a design that they were proud enough of that they branded it with the UMW logo, which you can't see in this slide, which you can see it over there, and printed enough for all of the pipe band here at Mirror Washington. Yeah. So what are some of the benefits of this? So the fellow obviously gets to deep dive into a passion project. Like, how awesome is it that you get paid to make videos about your dreams? And then the student body gets a variety of potentially infinite things that they might get because the deliverables are based on each project. So maybe it's workshops. Maybe it's process guides. But it can just be just about anything. Prong 3. Prong 3 is jobs. This is where we hire 10 to 12 students in a year to help us do all of the work above, as well as all sorts of other things. So we have a kind of pretty traditional hiring process. But it's worth pointing out that we actually have a student hiring committee. So the committee gets together and makes recommendations to us about those things. And we do spend a whole semester training these students so that they are ready to be full-time consultants come to fall. Oh. Yeah. Here they are completing their training. You can see there are a fun bunch. This is the honor of the nighting ceremony once you have completed your training. Love the people. You may be wondering, what kind of work do these students do? And the answer is just about anything we can unload on them. So their main job is consulting with their fellow students, right? Helping them with their digital projects. A particular domain of one's own. Getting started with that. We see a lot of those consultations. But also doing projects to help with the various things we've shown. Writing online guides about different digital tools. Doing class visits to introduce a tool or introduce our services. And all sorts of other things. Running workshops, training the new staff, all that. Yeah. The best part is we can kind of tailor what students want to do to it. Maybe their strengths and their interests. They often come to us with projects. Hey, I want to do this thing. And it's a one-off thing and we have something. But sometimes a student comes to us with something great. Do you remember Prong One? Prong One? What was Prong One? Workshops. Thank you. That was brought to us by a student who was like, I think it would be really great if we did workshop. So she started and it's part of what we do now. So thanks, Mandy. Thank you, Mandy. So you may be wondering what are some of the benefits of jobs, right? The student body obviously gets support in digital projects. It makes the work that we do possible. We didn't have students helping students. I don't know how we would do it at this scale. And I hope the consultants get a myriad of, you know, benefits. But some of them are just those practical things like job skills. They have resume builder. They have something they could talk about when they leave. They can point to tangible projects that they have done. So there you have it. Workshops, fellowships, jobs. The three prongs of engagement forming the trident of digital fluency. Now, you may be wondering, is this scalable? No! Do you think that you are going to be able to take this stuff and apply it to all the incoming freshmen of your, you know, institution? You're going to have a bad time. You may be wondering, will this save me time? No! This sort of high touch work with these students means that our calendars are full of meetings every week with students on all these various different projects. It doesn't save you time, but you do have those connections to them. You may be wondering. Does it have easily measured outcomes? No! Of course not. We do collect data, you know, attendance and all these things. But high touch, you know, model, it means there's a lot of qualitative feedback. Lots of great stories and students seem to love this, but you can't just show people some numbers and demonstrate the impact in a simple straightforward way. Now, you may be wondering, will I build meaningful human connections this process? Yes! We get to work one-on-one with these students in a very high touch way, right? And this means we get to know them and we get to tailor the work to our passions, their passions. You may be wondering. Yes, will students get practical, applicable experience? Yes! Of course, I think you've already seen several times they have these projects that they've done. They've wrestled with not only delivering that, but like coming up with it. These are all things that, you know, they're eager to show their future employers or wherever they're going next that they've done stuff. Absolutely. Now you may be wondering. Will doing this resurrect my faith in the work of higher education from the ashes of doubt and cynicism, leading me to rediscover the beauty and potential of human connection and collaboration and renew my sense of hope and purpose while also providing a transformative experience, not only developing students who will excel in the workplace, but can encourage them to be better versions of themselves and inspire them to rage against the dying of the light? Yes! This work feels meaningful. It definitely is impactful. And gosh darn it, on the day-to-day basis it's fun. Interested in learning more? Good news! Operators are standing by! At the bar after the conference. In the spirit of high touch, meaningful, one-on-one connections, we have not saved time for questions, but we are happy to talk to you at the bar afterwards or in the Discord. Feel free to ping us. Yes, so thank you for coming with us to help reclaim some digital fluency through our prongs of engagement. Thank you! Thank you very much! Thank you! Thank you, you've been great!