This topic has been interesting and I can relate to it as I have had a similar topic for my first-year students. We have during that topic looked at the student’s digital literacy as well as their digital footprint.

When listening to the Webinar with David White I started thinking about the age implication. I am myself just under 50 and have not grown up with the digital tools but I was fairly young when introduced to the World Wide Web, todays Internet, as well as to the mobile phone. I realise that, possibly because of my work and my children, am fairly native in the digital world. I tend to opt for the apps to do things, I shop online and I find information online. What I have been more restrictive with is my personal life online, I have a Facebook page (and now a blog) but I use it very rarely. I have made the clear distinction that if I put anything online it needs to be something that I can stand on the marketplace and shout out for everyone’s hearing. On a professional level I use LinkedIn on a daily basis, I post my own doings (professional), I tag and share things that I feel relevant to my professional being. I also use digital tools in my teaching, our digital learning platform Itslearning, Youtube clips, Mentimeter, kahoot etc. I try to integrate these things to make the teaching experience more interactive and give a variety of information sources during a lecture. I have also used Zoom, Teams and Google meet in both private as well as professional life. I find Teams a very useful channel for contact with different teams, as an information sharing platform as well as a chat forum or for meeting. Zoom has been more for teaching and meetings as we have found it to be highly useful. There has been a discussion also about the privacy issues and there we actually felt that having our zoom server in Europe felt safe.

In the article Developing digital literacies (2014) I liked the picture on the seven elements of digital literacy. I find that we need to teach young people this even though they have grown up with the digital world around them. First of all, I notice that not all students are digitally literate, they might have one or two of the skills but not all. Further critical thinking is something that they need to be thought as this is a major issue in todays digital world that gives you an abundance of information at the same time as it sorts information for you and feeds you with information you “like”. This is something that I was part of introducing to our students 2013, a critical thinking strategy because of the information flow. We actually included all but the box “digital scholarship” in the figure below.

Sources:

White David (2022) Webinar at ONL course

Developing Digital Literacies (2014)