My ONL journey has started. I though the word “journey” used here and there in the course description was a bit silly at first, but now I think it actually seem to be a rather proper description.

I see myself as reasonably digitally literate, in some areas. I am comfortable with sharing and co-editing documents with colleagues, and having remote meetings, I have given flipped-classroom courses with recorded lectures and in-class as well as online discussions. At the same time I’m not very active on social media; I have a facebook profile but that is pretty much it. Well, ok, I’m on linkedin and google scholar and researchgate, and probably more platforms that don’t come to my mind right now, but I don’t actively maintain them and I’m not quite comfortable with leaving more digital traces than necessary/unavoidable.

I think it is indeed true that digital literacy is not linear, as was discussed in the recommended youtube talks and in the webinar in week 3. The scale from visitor to resident on the internet makes sense, and I also agree with the orthogonal personal to institutional dimension. I think my strongest online presence is in the institutional visitor quadrant. That’s where I would place my use of tools and platforms like box, google docs, linkedin, scalable-learning, athena, zoom. It was quite interesting to see during the webinar, how different the distribution in this 4-quadrant space is for different course participants.

In our PBL group these past two weeks we have discussed various issues with open networked learning, like separating personal/private, thinking about data security, the range of digital literacies in the student group, and also the issue of availability. The latter encompasses both the question what constant online presence (“ständig uppkoplling”) affects us all (e.g. Dalstrom 2018), but also how this setup affects my work/life balance, and my ability to prioritize my different work tasks, as students expect me to be continuously available. We also discussed the problem that might arise at the other end of the spectrum, where students may feel isolated in a ´n online learning environment (e.g. Croft et al. 2015). From this I’ve learned the importance of taking care to schedule times for different activities, e.g. giving work-time and deadlines for consecutive tasks, and setting up specific drop-in remote meeting times, and group discussion times to aid focus and boundary-setting. I think ONL201 so far has been a good example of this. 

In our PBL group’s presentation, we added a “initial fears and obstacles” bullet point, and mine was that of all the accounts and passwords I need to set up and remember for the range of platforms I am expected to use. A couple of weeks into the course, I still find this a bit frustrating. How do people keep track of their accounts and passwords, let alone determine which email (or other) identity to use in different contexts, where the boundary between professional and private is blurred? Maybe I’ll find strategies for this during the course!

References

T. Dalström (2018)https://www.gp.se/debatt/ständig-uppkoppling-och-öppen-lärmiljö-stressar-alla-1.5604339

Croft et al. (2015) Overcoming Isolation in Distance Learning: Building a Learning Community through Time and Space

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.11120/jebe.2010.05010027