The first topic in the ONL202 course is on online participation and digital literacies. The focus has been on identifying ourselves in the digital space, how literate (or accustomed) we are with the digital tools available, and how we use those tools in our daily lives. The motivation for this seemingly is to know ourselves better and perhaps reflect on our strengths and weaknesses in the digital world. This felt to me a bit like a ‘personality’ test where you figure out if you are more suited for an architect type of job or a performer. Just like the personality test, this could perhaps be misunderstood as if you have a certain type of personality, you are unsuited for the jobs where other types of personalities could be more suitable. However, in the end its all about motivation! As David White rightly pointed out in his video ‘Visitors and residents (part 1)’, our online presence is based on our motivation in a certain digital tool/subject. My takeaway from this discussion is that one could find solution to his/her digital inhibition by motivation, for example motivation to provide the best education to the students.
I was much more intrigued by the other video by David White, ‘Visitors and residents – Credibility (part 2)’, where he discussed the value of what we do as a researcher. Publishing your fine work in a peer-reviewed journal is one of the highly reputed activities that one could do as a researcher, and its difficult to imagine that it would change in near future. One could already notice the trend of more researchers being active on websites liked LinkedIn, where they share their latest findings in a more ‘popular science’ format rather than a scientific journal form which may be more difficult to grasp for a general audience. It seems difficult to comprehend though that one would focus on getting more followers and comments on LinkedIn than having a more cited journal article as part of the job. The openness in terms of publishing methods has been rising rapidly in the past years with more focus on open access journals than subscription. In Sweden, the universities have even signed contracts with publishing giants Springer and Elsevier to publish all journal articles submitted there by university staff to be published as open access. Open access publishing is a great way of having openness at the same time as credibility.
The idea of remixing things to make them stick into one’s mind, as suggested by Doug Belshaw in the video ‘The essential elements of digital literacies’, could be interesting to experiment with in teaching if one wants to especially emphasise on a particular concept. In the end, its all about motivation and available time and resources. 
