IMPACT OF DIGITAL LITERACY ON THE ENGINEERING CURRICULUM

As most of engineering activities lies today in the Digital World, today engineers have to be confident in the use of the 21st century digital environment. Digital Literacy includes critical localization, evaluation and use of information in the digital environment. This environment (including the Web) is evolving into a set of community spaces and communication tools that enable collaborative activities like discovering, exchanging, commenting, criticizing and building information where future engineers will have to collaborate as professionals. Hence Digital Literacy is becoming a key set of competencies for the 21st century engineer. It encompasses digital extensions of many personal, professional and interpersonal skills included in the CDIO syllabus, such as Knowledge Discovery, Critical Thinking, Curiosity and Lifelong learning or Communications. Therefore, we claim that it shall be transversally included in engineering curricula, as practice of standard digital engineering skills. Wikis, blogs are nowadays state of the art tools for social learning. They encourage analytic and synthetic work on ideas. Hence they represent good tools for active learning practice as basis for integrated approach. We present three progressive experiments conducted in our institution, where such tools have been used to foster such digital skills and scientific knowledge at the same time. Lastly, the main difficulty to introduce such tools is definitely the faculty adoption of such tools as faculty may still be reluctant to use digital tools in education. We discuss our approach for faculty development in numerical skills, based on a mix of: early adopters support, communities of practice, institution requirements, animations and practical workshops