The Importance of Digital Literacy in Preparing Students for their Careers: a Synthesis
Proposition for Education in Digital Literacy
The Digital Age is defined by yourdictionary.com as, “the time period starting in the 1970s with the introduction of the personal computer with subsequent technology introduced providing the ability to transfer information freely and quickly.” You may have also heard this era called the Information Age, but I prefer to use the term Digital Age because most information in this time period exists in digital form. The digital technologies and new forms of communication that have been developed during this epoch have transformed almost every aspect of society; it has had a particularly important impact, in my opinion, on the job and business industries, and, more specifically, on the way that people market themselves to employers as well as the way new businesses market themselves and/or their business to consumers.
Today, there are more opportunities than ever for people to create jobs for themselves and start their own businesses by utilizing social media, the Internet, and various communication forms as marketing tools. With the ubiquity of the Internet, computers, and smartphones today, virtually everyone has access to a wealth of free digital tools and platforms which, when used correctly, can be valuable career-building resources. However, not everyone knows how to use these resources adroitly. To become digitally literate, one does not need to have a formal education, but I believe that formal education should be reorganized to include some sort of a required curriculum to instruct students in digital literacy since the possession of the set of skills this aptitude encompasses is becoming increasingly important to achieving success in many fields today.
This blog is a product of a Digital Literacies course that I have been taking this semester at Florida State University; the class is largely self-directed, and its curriculum has been structured around four projects with vague prompts and rubrics, which allow students a great deal of creative freedom. This course is still very new and limited in its enrollment capacity, but I believe that this course should be available to or even be a requirement for all students at Florida State to take before they graduate. Further, I believe that if the expansion of this course is successful at this school, then other formal schools of higher education should also offer a course like this one. To make a convincing argument for the advantages of offering such a class to the full student body here at Florida State and at other educational institutions, I will discuss in this post what it means to be “digitally literate” and how my personal development of digital literacy skills has impacted my education and influenced the direction of my career.
What it Means to be Digitally Literate—Peripheral Participation
In order to become digitally literate in a particular field of interest, one must become a peripheral participant in that field; one must learn how to interpret and adapt to the language that the field’s professionals use and the way that they communicate with others, view their specialization, address issues, and solve problems on a daily basis. The first important step in becoming a peripheral participant in a field is research—you should focus on identifying successful professionals within the industry who you aspire to be like, who you look at and think, “I want to do what they do,” and then strive to learn how they achieved or maintain their success. I accomplished this in my first project for this class, which was a digital tour consisting of four different blog posts that each profiled a different nutrition and fitness icon and their business. There are many different ways to become successful in any field, so it helped to analyze the success stories of just a select few individuals whose journeys to success I thought I could reasonably learn from and follow in a similar way in order to become successful in my own career.
In order to truly be a peripheral participant in a field of expertise, one must become proficient in the use of the digital tools, technological inventions, and social media or other digital platforms that are commonly used by professionals in that field. Case studies can be extremely helpful in identifying these tools that experts use every day to do their jobs and connect and communicate with other professionals in the industry. In analyzing the tools used by Adam Bornstein, Kayla Itsines, Steve Collins and Rebecca Ammeter of The Way Up Fitness, and the Nutrition Twins in my digital tour project, I discovered that each of these individuals utilize a variety of digital platforms, including but not limited to: blogs, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and email newsletters, to reach various populations of potential consumers and create a loyal community of followers through consistent digital communication and interaction. By searching through and reading slews of this digital material from each professional, I was able to learn from how they addressed their respective communities of followers and how they kept them interested by constantly generating new material and motivational posts.
I took the first step in demonstrating my proficiency in using the digital tools that are widely used by professionals in my field by creating this website on which to post my individual projects since the maintenance of consistently-updated websites was one thing that every expert that I have looked at in this field have had in common. Of course, once an individual reaches a certain level of success or experience, they can hire people who specialize in website management to maintain the digital platforms of the business for them while they attend to more important tasks; still, knowledge of how to manage a website and the development of blogging skills can be extremely valuable both to nutrition and fitness students like me and to professionals just beginning their careers. Creating blog posts and designing this website has allowed me to familiarize myself with the kind of language that professionals use to captivate and speak to interested audiences and clients.
In conducting research on tools that I wanted to include in my Toolkit of a Modern Dietitian project, I discovered eatrightpro.org, an online community for Dietetics professionals that acts as a forum within which professionals can communicate with each other, review each other’s research, and stay updated on new trends and discoveries that pertain to the profession. The site is run by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, which is the authoritative organization that is in charge of certifying Registered Dietitians, and I was not aware of its existence before this class prompted me to perform research that led me to discover it. I learned that I didn’t have to wait until I became a certified Registered Dietitian to join this serviceable community—I could become a member as a student, and I did, taking my peripheral participation within this field to the next level!
Peripheral participation in a field also means staying informed about new technologies and innovations that are currently being developed or applied within the field that may impact how business is done within its various professions in the future. This is an especially important practice for students today because of the extraordinarily rapid pace at which technology is constantly advancing and transforming our society. For example, in my Toolkit of a Modern Dietitian project, I conducted research on the activity- and nutrition-tracking technologies Fitbit and BitBite, respectively, from which I became educated on how these and similar tools are being integrated into dietetics and sports nutrition practices today. In this analysis, I also reflected on the potential influence that these technologies could have on health and nutrition care in the future if they are further incorporated into professional practices within the field.
Conclusion
This process of familiarization with my career field, which was driven by the projects assigned in this Digital Literacies class, has allowed me to build a solid repertoire of skills that I believe will be instrumental in launching my career, starting not when I graduate with my degree, but right now; the projects that I have completed in this class have allowed me to become proficient in the use of many of the tools used by nutrition and fitness experts today, and they have also taught me relevant self-marketing techniques that I can start utilizing now by engaging in digital platforms and by reaching out to and connecting with current nutrition and fitness experts. My accumulation of these skills, along with the knowledge that I have gained from educating myself about new innovations in this field that could potentially lead to changes in the types of jobs that will be available in the near future, have led to my maturation over the course of this semester into a true peripheral participant in the nutrition and fitness field.
It is easy for college students to get lost in the routine of their classes and only focus on maintaining a decent GPA and taking all of the courses required by their school to earn a degree; a majority of college students don’t sincerely consider the possibility of beginning their careers or at least building a solid foundation for it before they graduate and secure their first job, therefore many students don’t put a whole lot of thought or effort into preparing themselves for their careers while they are in college beyond earning their degree—at least not on their own. College students need some external force of motivation to push them to learn more about the field they want to be a part of professionally, start connecting with professionals, and start building a professional presence for themselves in that field while they are still in college.
As this semester draws to a close and I reflect on how much each of my classes this year have served to prepare me for my career in the real world, I conclude that what I learned in this course has indisputably been the most valuable and significant in impacting the direction of my career. I am leaving this Digital Literacies class with all of the faculties and know-how I need to start my career right now, I just need to muster up the courage to do it; regardless of if I decide to take the next step and establish a running blog and connect with professionals via digital communication tools and social media in the near future, I still feel that this class has given me an advantage over students who have not had the opportunity to take a course like this one and therefore may have lost sight of the bigger picture of the purpose of college being to prepare students for their jobs in the real world. I am convinced that all students could benefit from taking a course like this one, and I endorse the expansion of this course to be available to more students at more schools so that they can grow in their digital literacy skills as I have this semester.