Today I attended the 2011 Digital Literacy Forum at the Minnesota Department of Education. It was a well-attended event with plenty of folks from community-based organizations, a few teachers, lots of librarians, a couple of folks from the government and a handful of people from private businesses. The attendees primarily work with folks on the far end of the digital divide and/or work to develop programs and tools to promote digital literacy to form a more digitally inclusive community.

The day started with a presentation by Mary Ann Van Cura on digital inclusion – putting digital inclusion in perspective with statistics and stories. Then Catherine Settanni gave an overview of digital inclusion efforts of the last 10 years – highlighting Minnesota’s leadership in the field of digital inclusion based on collaboration.

A couple of resources came up:

• Technology Literacy Collaborative (TLC) – a Minnesota effort to promote digital literacy and inclusion. The website includes a directory of online curriculum and tools (look here before you develop a new training session) and a map of community technology centers. Right now the map is very metro-focused; it would be nice to see CTCs outside the Twin Cities add themselves to the map.
• Connect Minnesota Map – an interactive infographic on residential broadband access and adoption
• North Star Digital Literacy Standards – a collaborative effort to create a recognized set of tasks that determine digital literacy (You can access the presentation on the standards online.)
• They also handed out a Selected List of Efforts and Organizations, which I think they will also be putting on the TLC site. I’ll add a link if/when I see that go up.

• National Initiative: Digitally Inclusive Communities http://www.imls.gov/about/digitally_inclusive_communities.aspx
• Proposed Framework for Digitally Inclusive Communities: Final Report (See especially, p. 80-99, “A Guide to the Proposed Framework” ) http://www.imls.gov/assets/1/AssetManager/DIC-FrameworkReport.pdf