As to be expected, the beginning of the course was a lot about people getting to know each other and finding a relationship. A first and very positive finding was the video software Zoom. It works extremely well, even with 60 people attending a video conference and has lots of useful feature that work smoothly.

Otherwise, the first part of the course seems to be aimed at people who are not that well aquainted with the internet. The notion that there is an online and an offline world does not strike me as useful anymore, particularly in academia and in a course that is supposed about using online tools to help learning. I do not see how the concept of digital literacy differs from the concept of literacy. Anything written about it remains true (albeit a bit obvious), when the words digital and online are dropped from all statements. In the course literature, this is true, at best. There is the concept of a “digital identity”, as if such a thing could be uniquely defined, anymore than that none of us has a unique identity in the first place and changes who they are depending on the circumstances.

An important topic that was touched upon are free licenses. After having had to become a copyright expert by editing Wikipedia, that was unfortunately not much new.

Another realization however was that while for me, the topic of openness online is intricately tied to free licenses and open source software, this is not so for other educators. In a way, this shouldn’t come as a surprise, Lund University for example is just full of proprietary software. The faculty of science just bought licenses for the second alternative to moodle since I arrived. I’m not sure what will happen to the material on the old platform, but I guess it will burn.