February 25th the Open Network Learning course started. To be honest, I didn’t really know what to expect from it, more then I was a bit curious about what it might give me and if I could use any of the outcome in my own teaching. The first topic of the course was Online participation and digital literacy. The topic had just started, when the Corona crisis for real hit Sweden and university teaching quickly moved to a digital environment. Talk about a convenient time for this topic. And the situation really put my own digital literacy to the test.
Within less than a week we went from normal teaching to doing everything on-line, in different steps. So how do you clearly communicate in times like these? What tools can you use to make it easy and pedagogical for the students? And how much time and effort I’m expected to put into this change? Me, who consider myself being a digital newbie…
To be able to dig deeper into my own issues with the situation, we can use White & Le Cornu (2011a) continuum for Visitors and Residents, a gliding scale describing people’s engagement and motivation for engaging with the web. White & Le Cronu suggests that it’s not age and generation that makes up our digital literacy (e.g see. Pretskys thoughts about digital immigrants and natives from 2001), it’s rather people’s motivation and context that makes them act or not act on the web. A Resident is a person that spend a big part of their life online and where online participation is an important part of that person’s life. The web helps the person to build an identify and the web is the foundation for creating relationships with other people. The Visitor on the other hand is a person that uses the web to solve their current need. A Visitor goes online, find the tool he/she needs to solve the issue, solves it and then leaves the web. What is important here is that people seldom are pure Resident or Visitor, but rather somewhere in-between on a gliding scale (a continuum)
So how is the relevant for my in this situation? Well, consider my behavior on the web in general I would define myself as being on the Visitor side of the continuum. A quote from the Tall blog covers it pretty well:
”They (the Visitor, authors not) are sceptical of services that offer them the ability to put their identity online as don’t feel the need to express themselves by participating in online culture in the same manner as a Resident.”
– White & Le Cornu (2011b)
That’s me on the web. Yes, I do use social media and I do participate in on-line discussion, but I’m really careful in where I chose to integrate and who might be the readers of that conversation. I don’t want my digital identity to spill oven on my “real” identity (if there is a difference so to say, can be discussed…). I do act on the residence side of the continuum on the web, but that is mostly done in tools connected to my job and I use them on a quite simple[1] level. So being a Visitor, did create some challenges for me in moving my teaching into the digital world, since I’m not always that confident with many of the tools a Resident use. For example, how do I perform a lecture on the web? And what about seminars? Zoom is the tool our university uses for e.g. web-meetings and this was also the tool we encouraged to use in our teaching. A 1-hour crash course in Zoom got me going and made it possible to do both a lecture and two seminars on-line the first week. It worked out pretty well actually. The lecture went better than I expected where the interaction mostly took place via the chat functions where students could ask questions. The seminar left room for improvement. The hardest part was to get a discussion going between the groups in the seminar. I guess it goes down to both parts in the end if this is going to improve. I can become better in nurturing the students to discuss and I also think the students will become better at it after a while, since they also now to webinars.
When writing this post, I have just finished the first digital exam I had to create after the change. The original exam is a query, consisting of 15 key-terms/concepts central for the course. One version would be to convert this exam into a digital version with multiple choice questions. But with just one week to prepare, this wasn’t an alternative because of lack if time. So I had to go for a home exam where I used a scenario regarding “Panic Buy”, connection to the situation today with people hoarding frozen food and toilet paper (!). Quite convenient considering that the course is called Consumer Behavior. If the exam worked or not, I don’t know yet. But in a couple of days when I had time to read the papers, I will know…
/Viktor
References
Prensky, M. (2001), ”Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants”, On the Horizon (MCB University Press), vol. 9, no. 5.
White & Le Cornu (2011a) Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagement, First Monday, Vol. 16, No. 9.
White & Le Cornu (2011b): https://tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk/index.php/2008/07/23/not-natives-immigrants-but-visitors-residents/ (collected 24-03-2020)
[1] Simple in this case means that I upload files, communicate with students and have students upload their work/exams.
