Who am I as an individual in the digital age, and what characterizes your journey so far?

I relate to being a Digital Native, despite having spent my formative years playing Hopscotch and frolicking at playgrounds. It wasn’t until secondary school (13-16 years old) that I got my own Sony Ericsson flip phone, and my own Vaio laptop which weighed about 30 times my current Macbook Air. However, I would consider it easy for me to adapt to new technologies that slowly emerged through the years. The ease at which I use new apps and new digital tools characterizes my journey and further reinforces that I am a millennial who have an exquisite appetite for memes and exciting new trends that pop up online every other day.

Such ease helps a lot in my professional life as I am able to introduce useful online tools that would streamline processes at work, and I am always happy to help my colleagues learn them as well. During the first month of the emergence of Covid-19, I picked up the use of two tools (Panopto and Camtasia) within 4 hours to convert all our learning material online for the 2000 students in the module I am teaching.

What might ONL mean for your development and how are your experiences from ONL so far?

I think ONL would help me gain more cultural perspectives as my teammates are mostly from Sweden. I’m sure I would gain more depth in the pedagogical side of online learning, which would augment my future endeavors in teaching as well.

My experience from ONL so far has been positive. The only difficulty would be the timing to meet as I find myself having to prioritize work (especially in this Covid-19 situation where many urgent issues crop up every other day) over meetings with my group at times.

In Topic 1, we learned about David White’s model on digital literacy from two perspectives. I’m both a Visitor and a Resident, but due to privacy concerns, I see myself inclining towards the Visitor end more now. I try to leave less social traces on public platforms after being primed by the following video that shows how it’s incredibly easy to find out people’s literal whereabouts from their online postings.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/video-on-demand/talking-point-fy1920/helpers-and-mobile-phones-is-there-a-win-win-solution-12373792