Online participation and Digital literacies
The ice breaking session is always coming with fear and lack of trust. It was the first time, we met with the people with each from different country and with different background. Icebreaking has started by Patrik as the coordinator and then led by Karin and Lena. I like the idea of circle, as it gave opportunity to each member in the group to talk. I will like use this approach in my own classes. Lena and Karin have high literacy in terms of skills to use for digital learning. Lena always used different tools and even whiteboard in front of camera to show us the content and what issues need to be discussed during the meetings. for the digital literacy, I came out with some search and found few interesting articles that could be relevant for our case to understand the importance of phenomena. I believe the level of digital literacy particularly among the developing countries is still low and they need to improve it through education and training. This could be tricky during these days with COVID-19 pandemic as everything has shifted into digital. While, infrastructure needs to be in place for the good and stable internet connection.
We followed the rules and guidelines at the beginning. There was an amazing idea of singing for the topic. I could not imagine doing so, but eventually we did it finally and successfully. We rephrased a song written by Beatles and then Karin has made a piano song and we recorded the song. This is one of amazing jobs I have ever done in my life and won’t forget. That was amazing experience in my academic life, and I will highly recommend it others to do so something unusual in order to be unique. This approach even can be applied into the class depending on the topic, task, level and interest of students. I am happy to be part of this community experiencing something extraordinary
Reflecting on previous studies, there is evidence that shows attitude, together with digital literacy and self-efficacy can help improve the quality of outcomes received by students in the college (Prior et al., 2016). Though, the study is written for the online distance education, it encompasses the digital education through online learning platforms. The main definition of digital literacy comes from Paul Gilster that define it as the ability to understand and use information in multiple formats from a wide variety of sources when it is presented via computers. I have posted here some good references revealing the notion of digital literacy and you can keep them in the reference list for this topic.
References:
– David Buckingham (2015), “Defining digital literacy – what do you people need to know about digital media?, Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy, Vol. 10.
– Prior, D., Mazano, J., Meacheam, D., Heaslip, G., and Hanson, J. (2016). “Attitude, digital literacy and self efficacy: Flow-on effects for online learning behaviour”, Internet and Higher Education, 19, 91-97.
– Lee, S-H. (2014), “Digital literacy education for the development of digital literacy, International Journal of Digital Literacy and Digital Competence, 5(3), 29-43.
