The first topics of the ONL course were online participation and digital literacies. The topic stared off with a webinar by David White and Jörg Paregis. Before the webinar, we were asked to look at David White’s videos on the concept of visitors and residents in the online world. An essential part of David White’s message is that persons are not either visitors or residents in the digital world, but in reality, there is a continuum between being a visitor and a resident (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPOG3iThmRI&feature=youtu.be). He also talked about the personal vs. the institutional (e.g. work-related) sphere, which he showed as a vertical arrow crossing the visitor and a resident continuum. Concerning the personal and institutional spares, David White considers that as a continuum as well. He also discussed there may be a gap between traditional learning practices (such as through books and lectures) and the faster and often preferred learning practices (e.g. online sources that may not always be accurate) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO569eknM6U&feature=youtu.be). As David White suggests, perhaps we need a pedagogical shift to narrow this gap, by producing more reliable online teaching material. Something that I have not previously reflected on was that a person might be a digital visitor with some online tools, while being a resident with other tools. Personally, I see myself as a resident in searching scientific literature online, as somewhere in between concerning Facebook and Instagram, and as a visitor when it comes to blogging, Twitter, e-meetings (although I am staring to get used to it), shared workspaces and screencasting. By taking this course, I however hope to move closer to the resident-space in terms of using collaborative tools that may be useful for my teaching. An important insight that I have gained from this week is that although our younger students may be experts (and residents) on social media, they may be far out on the visitor spectrum when it comes to digital tools that are used for learning in higher education. Thus, it is important to not make any assumptions when it comes to students’ digital literacy. Our PBL group choose to present our work in a mind map. For that, we used the free software called, Mind Meister. In the mind map, we included thoughts, comments and links about topics related to online participation and digital literacies, such as privacy and digital footprints, legal aspects of online presence, and understanding digital literacies, including understanding your level of digital literacies (https://medium.com/literate-schools/literacy-in-todays-society-df8ee954ff3a).
