Before watching videos as learning materials for Topic 1, I have never realized that, passively, people can become an immigrant to the digital community. Quite scary! According to the definition, the digital native refers to the generation who has grown up with digital technology. Obviously, I am not. However, most of the current students and the future students are. The challenge is how to work with these native digital students during the learning and the teaching process.
The other issue I learned from Topic 1 is the visitor-and-resident model for engaging users into a digital society. Before studying this model, I have not thought about the concept of digital society, and the identity of residence in digital society through own institutions. If aligning myself with this model, most often I am the visitor in the spectrum of personal and institution. On the other hand, I observed that some younger generations actively publish personal life which I would write in personal diary when I was at their ages. At the same time, more and more institutions shares their visions through social media for instance Twitter. The challenge is how to become a resident of digital society with proper confidences as both learners and educators in a network of digital societies.
The models of digital literacies provide good tools or at least right dimensions to understand the challenges and to act accordingly. The models emphasize not only technologies but also other aspects such as communications, collaborations, creations, and evaluations. The challenges provide the opportunities of building up the courage from time to time and learning continuously by using the rules given in these models. Becoming more confident as a resident in the digital society is an integrated procedure and need a development thinking. I have been working in the technology field and thought that it is un-necessary to emphasize the technology too much during the daily teaching. After learning this topic, I realized that the technology should be emphasized more and should be updated more often. In additions, it worth to reconfirm the missions of own institutions and the social impacts of field knowledge from time to time during the teaching process. Digital societies functions similarly as traditional societies even have more broad impacts.
