About

 About the Digital Skills Glossary

The Digital Skills Glossary is an attempt to create something of genuine use to educators in the UK's heritage sector, though others are, or course, welcome to use it should they find it useful. The idea first occurred when I was research for the final project of my PostGraduate Certificate in Digital Leadership in 2020. The project, as yet unpublished but for which I received a Distinction grade, was titled "Developing Digital Skills for Educators in the Heritage Sector: What Skills Should be on a Digital Skills Competency Framework for Museum Learning Specialists?"

This project sought to collate the digital skills that are relevant to museum learning specialists, presenting them as a set of competency statements in order that people working in relevant roles may be be better able to find out what they need to know; to identify what it is that they don't know they don't know. In late 2021 the identified set of competencies were further refined and added to the Group for Education in Museums (GEM)'s Core Competencies framework, an earlier version of which provided some of the inspiration for my project given that it was fairly comprehensive but had almost no mention of the digital skills which had become absolutely essential to workers in all sectors since the framework's inception.

The framework, now that my work on digital competencies has been incorporated, is still only a collection of descriptions about what digital skills people working in learning roles in museums and galleries should aim to acquire: it doesn't tell them how to do so. From experience, an important step in enabling the acquisition of new knowledge, especially with regards to self-educating (which is often a requirement for developing one's personal practise as a museum educator), is understanding what words and phrases mean in a context specific to our own field.

The final nudge came when a fellow heritage learning freelancer, Melissa, showed me some work she'd completed for another organisation. Included as a supporting document was a brief pdf glossary of terms relating to digital skills that she had prepared to ensure that the people trying to benefit from her work didn't have to spend valuable time googling words and phrases that whilst relatively simple when you know what they mean, are often incomprehensible when you don't.

Why not, I thought, collect everything that could be required in one simple go-to website?

Welcome to the Digital Skills Glossary for Museum Educators.

This resource has been produced from a combination of original work and synthesis of various existing materials, online and off. See the "sources" list in the sidebar for some key providers of inspiration for this resource.

About Me

I'm Tom and I'm a maths teacher, museum educator and digital learning advocate from the British Midlands but working remotely everywhere.

I split my working time between teaching and freelance museum education consultancy. You can find examples of my work in my portfolio, and get in touch via either LinkedIn or twitter, or check out my professional website for other ways to contact me.

You may be wondering why I felt that I'm the person to set this up: who am I to talk about digital skills, learning, and heritage sector education? Well...

I'm an early millennial, born into a world just finding its feet with digital technologies creeping into the average home: mobile phones went from a ludicrous luxury item to being in everyone's pocket over the course of my childhood, and whilst internet access was pretty much ubiquitous in British households by the time I became an adult, I remember the days of arguing with my brother over whose turn it was on the internet, and then rushing to download my emails over a dial-up connection before my dad started to complain about the phone bill. The internet and I have grown up together.

In 2007 I completed my PGCE in maths and taught in secondary schools for a few years (there's the learning bit). From 2013 to 2020 I was part of the Learning team at Bletchley Park, and since I left I've been doing various projects for museums around the UK (there's the heritage education). In 2020 I completed a PgCert in Digital Leadership. The assessed portion of this consisted of two assignments and a final project. The assignments focused on finding out what secondary school maths teachers might want from digital resources provided by museums and then producing and trialling such a resource with maths teachers. My final project was titled 'Developing Digital Skills for Educators in the Heritage Sector: What Skills Should be on a Digital Skills Competency Framework for Museum Learning Specialists?' and led, a year later, to being commissioned by GEM to update their Core Competencies for Museum Educators, including integrating my digital skills competencies into their broader framework. I have also contributed to some digital skills training for museum educators.

I have since completed an MA in Education. There wasn't so much of a digital focus to that, but you can see the titles of my assignments here.