Reflections on Topic 1 of ONL181
The first topic of the ONL181 course is over. The central theme of topic one was the exploration of digital literacies and skills to navigate in the digital world as an educator.
Besides the the provided topic, it was also the first “real” task our PBL-group had to accomplish. I did not know exactly what was expected of us. Tough luck, I opted for taking a leading role together with Karin. The theme of navigating through the digital world resonated in our task to coordinate a bunch of people from all over there world, whose common feature was, that none of us is an native English speaker. Besides that, we come from vastly different backgrounds, with different strengths and challenges.
We had to learn new tools and establish routines of collaborating. I found it interesting to watch the group develop certain dynamics and let personalities and backgrounds (professional) and national stereotypes show through.
The Law of Jante
When focusing on the central theme of topic one “digital literacies and participation” we stumbled upon the “Law of Jante” from the novel of author Aksel Sandemose which became an unofficial code of conduct in the Scandinavian countries. Being German, with a faible for Scandinavian culture I had to dig a little deeper.
The ten rules of Jante are:
- You’re not to think you are anything special.
- You’re not to think you are as good as we are.
- You’re not to think you are smarter than we are.
- You’re not to imagine yourself better than we are.
- You’re not to think you know more than we do.
- You’re not to think you are more important than we are.
- You’re not to think you are good at anything.
- You’re not to laugh at us.
- You’re not to think anyone cares about you.
- You’re not to think you can teach us anything.
In the discussions during our meetings, we discovered, that one of the major obstacles of feeling comfortable within the digital world and especially with regards to social media revolves around feeling safe. The easiest way of getting out of harms way might be staying off the internet entirely. But one might miss out on the vast opportunities social media holds as a reward for the ones who master them.
Using the Law of Jante seems to be a good way of not getting to much exposure and attention and become a valuable member of any (online) community)
The web…what’s under the surface?
Visitor or Resident vs. Digital Native or immigrant
The other theme of Topic 1 was the reflection of our own placement within the landscape of social media platforms and tools. We thought about different possibilities to quantify our expertise in using the tools and to rate our comfort zone. We rapidly stumbled upon to major ways of discriminating different skill levels.
The digital world seems to be divided into to fractions. On tries to tie expertise and ease of use of technology ans skills to a generation, or at least expects certain generations to get along easier than others. The prototypical generation in this context are usually the millennials. They call the people who use digital tools and browse social media for their benefit intuitively “digital natives”, whereas the ones who struggle more are called “digital immigrants”. They have to put much more effort into the same task than their fellow digital natives.
The other fraction divides the to groups into “residents” and “visitors” of certain tools and is more focused on individual platforms the overall ability to use the entirety of what the twenty-first century has to offer.
In my opinion both theories need to be combined to self-evaluate ones skills and to identify the need to improve in the use of the platforms you can and/or should use to create the best learning experience for your students.
Be aware, that you and your students come from different places and have different qualifications and requirements for taking part in open networked learning.
The great Randall Monroe from XKCD has (as per usual) the definitive answer to everything related to generations.
I am looking forward to learning more. I have the feeling, we just scratched the surface of what it means to navigate through the digital world as an educator and/or student.
Please comment below.
Tl:dr (too long, didn’t read)
even for a millennial, the digital world is sometimes hard but worthwhile exploring.
Tools we used:
Der Beitrag Reflections on Topic 1- The Law of Jante erschien zuerst auf ingmar-finkenzeller.de.