“I have just signed up to do an online course and I am excited to be there. But I have little experience with online courses and it feels really challenging to get started to connect and find my way with all these new sites and tools. I guess that other participants will be more experienced than me and I feel stupid asking about things. We are asked to create a Learning blog on the web; it feels a bit scary to do this. I do share things on Facebook with friends, but here, in the open? I want to keep my private life separate from my professional life. But on the other hand, my students seem to share and discuss all sorts of things in social media and use all kinds of tools and resources.”
This is very common – not only relating to technology and some issues raised include:
- Excitement balanced with some fear – can be good as adrenaline from fear and excitement is a good learning motivator – the facilitator/teacher should be aware of these issues
- Fear of unknown in general perhaps – the facilitator/teacher must be patient
- New software tools to learn – learning can take longer for older people – again patience to facilitate learning and decision on using an older facilitator identifying with the new technology adopter or using a younger more technology savvy facilitator/teacher
- No clear immediate needs identified – often a problem with software tools even if intuitive to use – this requires consulting/coaching (This is overused and colloquial for me?) rather than good technical knowledge
- Social anthropological/sociology issues – i.e. where does digital communication fit in evolutionally? What communication and learning changes have occurred.
- Do data consumers such as Facebook or Google use algorithms based on anthropological evolution to manipulate technology users, thereby making newer ones feel less capable?
- Is there a way an institution help address some of these fears above?
- It is imperative to use a Portal to share information amongst stakeholders in the learning process (Institution, Subject Facilitators/Teachers, Students/Learners and Parents/Guardians – this could include BlackBoard, Moodle, Joomla, Microsoft SharePoint/Azure/Office 365
- WhatsApp functionality integration into these mentioned software portals as so many people know and use it – and there is a WhatsApp for a business – a business customisable tool with default and user programmable messages.
In order to solve the problem the above should be considered in the context of digital citizenship. This was quite a nice graph:
 |
| Social Media Graphic after Marx (2018) |
Digital Citizenship includes 9 Elements as noted by Ribble (2017), Ribble (2011) and Crocket et al. (2011). They are shown below:
 |
| Nine Digital Citizenship Elements after Ribble, (2011) |
These nine elements are have 3 groups:
 |
| The 3 groups of 9 elements of digital citizenship after Independent Institute of Education, (2017) |
These nine elements may priovide some background into helping our new technology user overcome their fears and understand how more technology savvy people operate.
There are also 5 fluencies that digital citizens who understand the 9 elements can posses. These are shown below:
Information fluency is research
Solution Fluency is problem solving
Media Fluency is advertising
Collaboration Fluency is working in teams – like project management
Creativity Fluency focuses on unusual skills like music, art, physical skills like yoga, visual-spatial or social skills.
We also need to understand what a Digital Footprint is – i.e. ones online trail of data. This can be both active (information one is aware of) like forms one fill in, emails you send, WhatsApp messages one sends etc and passive (information one is unaware of) such as can be collected by data consuming organisations like cookies, user data collected without consent etc.
Conduct online is also is best done by adhering to Virginea Shea’s Digital Etiquette (Netiquette) guidelines (Shea, 1994) which include:
- One interacts with people
- Use the same behaviour online that you follow in real life.
- Be ethical in your engagement.
- Dont break the law. Cyber Law is a difficult and murky topic to police but sometimes crackdowns can be far-reaching and fast.
- Use conduct and rules in context of group membership – expert communication is different from social communication.
- Respect other people’s time and bandwidth – don’t share time-wasting or large files unnecessarily.
- Do not diagree emphatically with group discussions.
- Do not raise controversial issues without permission and consensus of the entire group.
- Look good online – physcally if on video and also ones Digital Footprint
- Watch grammar, spelling and punctuation before you post if at all possible unlessthe group language is not ones mother tongue. But Google Translate can help.
- Only post things you have knowledge about. Research what you do not know (Information Fluency)
- Share expert knowledge.
- Offer answers and help others where you can.
- Help keep flame wars under control.
- Don’t respond to flame wars.
- Respect other people’s privacy.
- Don’t give out other people’s details, online or offline.
- Don’t abuse your power. The more power you have, the more important it is how you use it.
- Be forgiving of other people’s mistakes. We all were once a newbies.
- Do not type in Capital Letters, make them bold, underline them or enhance them unnecessarily without permission and consensus of the entire group.
References Crockett, L., Jukes, I. & Churches, A., 2011. Literacy Is Not Enough: 21st Century Fluencies for the Digital Age. 1 ed. s.l.:Corwin. Independent Institute of Education, 2017. Digital Citizenship. 2 ed. Sandton(Gauteng): Independent Institute of Education.
Marx, I., 2018. Topic 1 – Digital Literacy. [Online] Available at: https://izaanmarx81.wixsite.com/mysite/blog/topic-1-digital-literacy [Accessed 09 October 2018]. Ribble, M., 2011. Digital citizenship in schools PB – ISTE & Eurospan. British Journal of Educational Technology, 14 October, 43(6), p. 166. Ribble, M., 2017. Nine Elements of Digital Citizenship. [Online] Available at: http://digitalcitizenship.net/Nine_Elements.html [Accessed 09 October 2017].
Shea, Virginia, G., 1994. Netiquette. Albion Books.
United Nations. 1948. United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. [Online] Available at: http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ [Accessed 09 October 2017].