KATHMANDU
Dr Sweta Baniya, Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Tech, USA, along with Laura Gautier, and Scott Fralin collaborated online with Code for Nepal and curated 'Ut Prosim Beyond Boundaries: Global Outreach During the Pandemic', on fall 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Two-day Huawei Digital Nepal Conclave 2022
It is an exhibition where they curated their professional experiences on an online service-learning-based professional and technical writing course at the Department of English, Virginia Tech that aimed at serving rural communities in Nepal and enhancing digital literacy.
According to Dr Baniya, the ‘Creating User Documentation’ class introduced students to the knowledge and skills necessary for communicating information to diverse audiences. The purpose of Baniya’s fall 2021 class was two fold: to fulfill the learning outcomes of the class on preparing audience-centered documentation in varied environments and to calibrate this documentation for rural Nepali audiences to support Code for Nepal. Code for Nepal is an international nonprofit, community-based organization that works to enhance digital literacy among women in rural Nepal’s marginalized population.
This exhibition curates the multimodal and digital works produced by the students, including their reflections on learning from the partnership. The exhibition will also illustrate the stories and experiences of Dr Baniya, her student Gautier, and the community partner Ravi Kumar. The students created a varied range of user documentations, mobile application prototypes, and web interfaces that focused on empowering the rural population by enhancing digital literacy in post-pandemic Nepal.
In addition to creating and designing the virtual exhibit, the University Libraries also played a key role in digital literacy, according to a press statement released by Baniya. “This exhibit is a great example of how University Libraries keep pushing toward digital literacy,” said Baniya. “I even used the University Libraries’ Digital Literacy Framework in my class which was a great teaching and learning tool.”
