We have now had our first week ”Connecting”, and has started Topic 1:“Online participation & digital literacies”.
It is indeed a fascinating journey we´ve embarked. I´ve really enjoyed the first weeks of “connecting” with my PBL group 3, with members from Germany, Finland, Sweden and South Africa, and at least partly, Scotland.
I reluctantly volunteered to lead the first Topic with Rosann (thanks for all your work Rosann, and for introducing me into both Coggle and WhatsApp!). It felt very strange to be “the first couple out” as I didn´t know really what was expected from us. I am grateful to my fellow students on this course Ida and Gregor who volunteered to take notes during our online meetings.
Watching the videos and reading the suggested articles was, as everything on this course this far, an eye opener. I learnt several, for me, new phrases like e.g. memes, which adhere well to my sense of humor.
So where am I as far as digital literacies go? I would definitely place me in the category Visitor, rather than Resident, the descriptions coined by White and Le Cornu (2011)1. Before the start of this course I was regularly using Skype and FaceTime to communicate with research colleagues, but was (and still am) barely on Facebook and Messenger. I have my profile on LinkedIn, Academia as well as Research Gate, but my presence there is intermittent, to put it mildly. I think my reluctance to be more active on these platforms is partly my personality. I don´t feel at ease with not knowing who will see and read my profile and what they will think about it. Or as I put it to one of my colleagues at my Department – my biggest fear with posting my blogs is that someone might actually read them….
After reading other persons’ great blogs I feel even more humble, but I also realized that I’m using the Internet more than I thought of when first starting to think about the content of this blog. I do use booking.com when I go on vacation, I book my train, airline and bus tickets via the net, I order my (paper!) books on the internet, and use the digital learning platform Blackboard in my role as a university teacher. And I listen to streamed music, and watch streamed TV, as well as use Google Maps when trying to find my way in new places.
CC0 Public Domain
Nevertheless, I would say I´m on a very steep learning curve, which I´m super excited about. The reason I picked this picture is that I was away from work life for two years, due to a benign brain tumor which was eventually surgically removed, and I now work full time again since about 18 months. One of the souvenirs from this adventure is difficulties to keep focus for longer times. Hence the title of this chapter – I wish I had more time to really dig into this extremely fascinating, for me, new world!
I agree with White and Le Cornu (2011)1that Natives and Immigrants, first coined by Prensky (2011)2,3 and the built-in reference to age might not be the best metaphor. In that respect, I read the excellent “toolbox” provided to us by Alastair Creelman4, and asked the 15-year old in our family how familiar she was with these different tools, and somewhat surprisingly to me she was not at all as familiar with them as I had expected.
I can thus better relate to the description of “Visitors and Residents”, coined by White and Le Cornu (2011)1, and also used by Lotta Mörtsell in her excellent webinar.
In her two-dimensional coordinate, she also used the continuum of Private – Professional.
On these scales, I definitely see myself as Visitor – Professional. I do not feel comfortable to post personal things on social media, as alluded to above, but I hope this may change during or after this course.
One thing I have thought about a lot is how we in our teaching, where we have a PBL-based curriculum, always tell the students a number of suggested textbooks, but never or very rarely give them suggestions for useful web pages. We are also taught to tell them not to use Wikipedia. Although I am reluctant to only rely on Wikipedia, I do think that it often is an excellent introduction to a subject. Also, when we meet again after the self-study period in the PBL circle, quite often students mention Khan Academy5as an often-used recourse. I would love to hear your thoughts about this.
I think this relates to the subject of Source criticism. How do we discriminate between real and fake news and or “facts”? Young people in Sweden are taught both digital and traditional source criticism. The Internet Foundation in Sweden, IIS6 reports that younger people in Sweden are more critical to information on internet, compared to older people. They think this difference may be due to people younger than 35 years’ report that they have received information about how to evaluate information on the internet, in contrast to people over 35 years of age. In this regard, I think the paper by Ostensson (2013)7about teaching Internet Source Evaluation is a good starting point, especially among us “oldies”…. Without “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”, he suggests a re-evaluation of the often-used checklist-like tools. He instead advocates using strategies like Contextualizing, Sourcing and Corroborating, based on recognizing certain criteria including Authority, Accuracy, Objectivity, Currency/Timeliness and coverage.
The Doug Belshaw TedTalk8, did talk to me in several ways. Among many other things, he talked about the progressive, rather than linear, sequential way of adopting digital skills, and how the focus of your own interests make the learning progress much easier. I think I am the traditional, “linear sequential” learner, and is now actively trying to find it okey to browse around the internet, finding bits and pieces of valuable tools for teaching as well as learning here and there, and also by the interactions with my student peers on this course.
I am very much looking forward to continue this journey.
- White, D. & Le Cornu, A. (2011) Visitors and residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9).
- Prensky, M (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On the Horizon, MCB University Press, 9(5).
- Prensky, M (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. Part II: Do They Really Think Differently?On the Horizon, MCB University Press, 9(6).
- Ostenson, J (2014) Reconsidering the Checklist in Teaching Internet Source Evaluation. Libraries and the Academy, 14 (1)no. 1. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/pla.2013.0045
- The essential elements of digital literacies: Doug Belshaw at TEDxWarwickhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8yQPoTcZ78