My first time to use internet can be dated back to 1999. At that time I first got an email account and sent emails to my pen-friends in the US. Slowly I learned to use internet to look for information and other social media. I was very keen om learning new staff online until about eight years ago. I mean I still surf online but not much with blog och social media. Now when I start to write blogs, I saw my old site I created 2011 to use as my website. It was a strange feeling that time has gone so fast.

I started to use social media more often since last year when I started to teach Chinese at Lund University, because it is kind of tradition that every course has a Facebook group to share study recourses.

Neither many years ago when I was very active online, or now I started to get online more often, I have not thought about the notions of residents and visitors, the personal and the institutional in the axes that David White mentions in his video. Now when I meditate, I realize that I actually have experienced the four notions. From being active online to not active and then active again, this is the transformations from the resident to the visitor and back to resident again. Now I also use Facebook partly for my teaching, and writing blogs for my learning reflection, so I consider this as a transformation also, a transformation from the personal to the institutional. I feel fine with my digital abilities at the moment, and I do not feel like to learn any new tools if  the tools I am not going use very often. One of the reasons is that I do want to limit my time being online, and spend more time with family and friends.

Here I also want to bring up another issue: using social media for teaching. As I mentioned above that every Chinese course has a Facebook group. Whenever I mentioned that we have Facebook groups, I can always hear som negative voices. Once, a teacher i Political Science said that she might demonstrate for using Facebook. I could not explain why they are so against Facebook, but I would like to explain how I use Facebook and why I use it.

I teach new beginner’s course and usually I only meet my students once or twice a week. The Facebook group we use  as s “an outside- classroom communication space for the students to engage with and help each other with course assignments, and share resources and information” (Akcaoglu & Lee, 2016). One the Facebook group I usually post some interesting Youtube videos for Chinese studies, I also post task and announcements. We have web-based learning portal live@lund, and we are on the way to start to use Canvas. However, students do not login to check new messages all the time, instead, many students have Facebook app in their mobil phones, whenever there is a new message, they get a notification. At the same time, it is easier to keep an track on who has read the message. Of course, when I post message on Facebook, I also simultaneously on their learning portal. Because the learning portal is official and in case some students do not have Facebook, they do not miss any information. Besides, posting message on Facebook is made the access to the message easier, because I have encountered some students who did not login in live@lund very often.

Another important reason I use Facebook group is I want my students to post:1. some words or sentences they have difficulty to pronounce; or 2. Something they want to share with their course mates, f. ex. something interesting; or 3. News they read and would like to share in Chinese on Facebook and I encourage other students to comment. (I just realize that it is a bit like our ONL course, everyone write a reflective blog and other course mates to comment). My hope is to improve student-student relations and lead to a better learning environment. 

Many teachers also worry that Facebook is too private and using Facebook means sharing private life with students. Actually using Facebook group does not mean that the group members can see each other’s profile with personal information or posts, but rather to get the information posting in the common group. I believe it works as long as teacher can manage to keep a good balance between personal and private (Elmgren & Henriksson, 2016).

However, this might cause some pedagogical challenges in handling the teacher-student relationship later on. It happened to me that I got friend request from my students. At the beginning I was not sure how to react, thinking that I was not keeping proper distance to him as a student if I accept the request. However, I decided to accept the request, and tried to view social media as a way to communicate with my students and get their feedback of the lectures. 

The pedagogical challenges that can arise when teachers try to have more personal relation and communication with students for the purpose of creating better learning environment and motivation. As Elmgren & Henriksson (2016) mentioned, “for a teacher who first becomes good friend with his students and then requires demands and makes judgement can easily raise issues.(Translated from Swedish “för en lärare som först blir god vän med sina studenter och sedan ska ställa krav och göra bedömningar uppstår lätt problem).” This is exactly what happened in my case. To criticize myself, I did not manage to keep a good balance between personal and private (Elmgren & Henriksson, 2016). This is something I will bear in mind for my future course. I will continue to create a personal relation to my students but still stay firm on my principles.

JISC Netskills, White, David. University of Oxford. (2014, March 10). Part 1: Visitors and Residents:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPOG3iThmRI&feature=youtu.be