Before the webinar by David White, I watched David’s short video on the concept of Visitors and Residents on YouTube. This seven minutes’ video briefly walked me through the notion of “digital natives” v.s. “digital immigrants” put forward by Pensky (2001), arguments for why this metaphor is flawed and David’s alternative proposal of “Visitors & Residents” to capture our relationship with the web. I felt the video made sense to me but not entirely sure. But after I attended the wenibar and had some readings on Pensky (2001) and White and Le Cornu (2011), then I understood and agreed more with David’s crtitisim against the simplified dichotomy of either “digital natives” or “immigrants” based on individual’s age or technical skills. Instead, we should look into in details on individual’s engagement with technology when we describing digital literacy. White and Le Cornu (2011) propose a new typology “Visitor modes & Resident modes”, and it is a spectrum since individuals can be visitors or residents depending on the online context. Visitor-mode individuals use the web mainly for information searching or using the online tools to do some tasks without interacting with other people or leaving any footprints online, while resident-mode individuals consider the online platforms to be a place they can interact with people as in real life, to share their thoughts, build network, comment on others posts etc. All these activities leave social traces online and may affect he or she and other people directly or indirectly.

In preparing our group work on Topic 1. I did a brief investigation on YouTube as an online platform. Do we need to make videos fully public and have many followers in order to be identified to be a resident?

Not really.

In order to be a resident on YouTube, we need to be clear about the terms and conditions, privacy policies, advanced tools for enable/disable plugins and ads, the risk and consequences of publishing videos and so on. We need to be capable of using the different blocks/ functions to best meet our objectives e.g. to communicate with your video audiences.

YouTube For Education

YouTube is massive. There are billions of videos available thus making it difficult to separate the quality videos from the not-so-quality ones. To use YouTube for education, the lecturers need to create a learning place where the students can focus on the studying materials and not be distracted by other information. The lecturers may pose questions to be followed up by a discussion on YouTube or other platforms, and be able to combine YouTube with other learning tools to best achieve the goals of promoting students’ learning. 

To be a resident on YouTube, one does not necessary need to create massive public videos and to have many followers. The lecturers using YouTube for a flipped classroom is an example of being a resident, but the lecturers may have their lectures partially public (only public to the students), and have a limited amount of followers/ audience. But they did create a place to reside on YouTube with continuous “maitainance” and always ready to welcome their new visitors (new students) to their place.

References:

Prensky. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part 1. On the Horizon, 9(5), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1108/10748120110424816.

White, D. (2014). Visitors and Residents. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPOG3iThmRI

White, D. & Le Cornu, A. (2011) Visitors and residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9). https://firstmonday.org/article/view/3171/3049.