I am an African female who accessed a computer for the first time at a cyber cafe in Kenya at 18 years of age immediately after high school. Naive but at the same time very excited to have an email address and keen to distribute it across to my peers for online communication including sharing information and pictures. I would look forward to an inbox message as I fumbled on replies, attaching files and archiving documents. In a few years I was the proud owner of a Dell laptop after I graduated from university and gelled into social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter) as well as utilizing software to manipulate research data and present research findings. Interestingly, I realized you can never get to the point that you can confidently say that “i am the expert in the digital world”. New tools, programmes and software are constantly being developed depending on need.
Digital literacy is quite relative depending on what exactly you need to accomplish in the digital space. One may feel quite literate when using a software they have been exposed to but illiterate when challenged with a new software. However its important to note that we cannot think of literacy and illiteracy in the digital space as two categories but rather as a continuum. Its a process.
I am a digital immigrant in the online world as depicted from my digital biography. My digital identity is young in my personal as well as professional life and are quite different/delinked as I like to separate these two. ONL191 for my development will certainly be a great milestone in improving my digital literacy in various elements. I have fumbled quite a bit but getting my footing day by day. I was really excited when my a friend and colleague Sinead Whitty from Faculty of Capacity Development invited me to participate on ONL191. This will be a great milestone for my professional development in online teaching.