Digital literacy
Background
This section contains help pages about computer and digital literacy, ie, skills needed to find, navigate, and produce work within the digital world. Items listed in this section of the manual come from my 20+ years experience teaching undergraduates in bioinformatics. Our students come with a wide-range of computer skills, deficiencies in making computers work for us, as opposed to simply a text entry application and way to watch videos.
Pages in this chapter range from general to specific skills needed to do bioinformatics. The audience intended is in support of our first year students in biology and biochemistry, data science, environmental sciences, and forensic science at Chaminade University; our intention is to provide an introduction to foundational statistics and bioinformatics techniques. These concepts and examples are worked into our curriculum to support use of “big data,” data science, visualization and analytics in the areas of biomedicine, social sciences and the natural and built environments.
This section of the manual, like the systems biology section, which will see significant increase in my “how tos” and “why tos” in the future, represent common, foundational tasks or methods students need to succeed, but often lack experience with despite their well-deserved reputation for “tech-savvy” (eg, see Agents of change … MedCity News).
These digital literacy activities were designed to:
- Prepare the students for further education in advanced biology courses, or related fields.
- Introduce the student to bioinformatics and gain confidence in use of computer technology in science.
- Provide students with hands-on experience answering questions with data.
Current pages on helping to improve digital literacy skills include