It was in Topic 1 that I delved deep into the topic of digital literacy. The webinar by David White introduced the concept of digital residents vs visitors, which is a refinement of Prensky’s digital natives vs immigrants paradigm. As someone who likes to believe most things are a shade of gray, I certainly liked the resident-visitor paradigm better.

The webinar, tweet chat, and the discussions we had in the PBL group shed more light on this topic. It was only through these that I realized digital literacy is very tool-dependent. So what prevents someone from adopting a tool?

Let us start with the most obvious one – there was simply no need for someone to adopt a tool. This was the case with tools like Zoom for many people before the COVID situation necessitated its use. Zoom’s enterprise customer base increased more than 5 fold in Q1 2020. The actual usage increase will be much more.

Another one is the misconceptions about the use and power of certain platforms. I am someone who used to be proud of being very digitally literate without fully understanding the meaning of it. I was a Facebook user well before most people in my part of the world. Yet, I started using Twitter only during Topic 1 of ONL, and realized it can be more fun and useful than I thought it to be. I came across this article which I found pretty interesting in this regard.

There are, of course, people who are wary of using certain tools and platforms for worry of being scammed/ getting into other kinds of trouble. It seems the person who is the subject of the Topic 1 problem scenario falls into this category. This worry is not entirely unfounded, as there are cases of people losing their positions and reputation over what they expressed through certain tools.

Through Topic 1 and ONL journey at this point, my digital literacy improved with respect to three tools – blog (though I have used WordPress as a platform for my website in the past, never really for blogging), Twitter, and Padlet.