During my bachelors studies, around 2007, I remember I asked one of my senior’s for getting invitation to Gmail for sending e-Mails to apply for a job. I think, that is the first step to enter to digital space. That was something exciting to encounter with a new technology. As I gained access to internet daily from my master studies, I was mastering about several other tools in the digital space, Google eco-system, social networking platforms such as Orkut (anybody remember), Facebook, Twitter, Skype, IP-Messenger (Local Area Network messenger), DC++ (local sharing) platforms, etc.
I have also been exposed being online participation in institutional space such as online courses, Google Drive, LinkedIN, Moodle, etc.. to utilize the services to gain knowledge on technical aspects within my engineering domain. All these services help me to foster my knowledge to understand the engineering concepts quicker, reliable and efficient to improve my career growth. Not all information is accessible with the institute, hence, I found lot of information through other online courses at that time, MIT open course ware, Stanford online courses, Berkeley online courses, etc.. to aware of recent trends in education and research.
At the same time, being staying for from the family, I want to be constant touch with them through online. We missed together to keep in touch and worried that we won’t get lost. Hence, it become necessity for them to understand the new way of communication though they were hesitant to learn new language, they slowly understood the potential benefits such as communication, knowledge transfer and improving the livelihood by utilizing digital tools.
From the past experiences within the digital space, I came to realize that some people are digitally naive for this new technology and need proper support to move into digital native. The support usually comes either through intrinsic motivation or extrinsic motivation within their new demands and requirements (Lin et al, 2017). The support, sometimes has constraints due to less visibility, inaccessibility to infrastructure, lack of supporting environment, etc (Edwards, 2015). Though entertainment becomes an apparent motivation to enter into digital space using social networking tools where they use more informal approach of transferring information and knowledge, they were hesitant to connect through digital space in the institutional space (George and Odgers, 2015).
Surprisingly, there is also digital divide in the institutional space where both learners (students and teachers) were more confined to the traditional practices of learning and missing the potential benefits of utilizing the digital arena to improve the way of learning theories, increasing the efficiency of teaching, connectivity between students and teachers and creativity that are quite important for research and education (Livingstone, 2012). There is also lack of awareness from the institution to create and foster a proper learning platform and provide necessary logistics issues to support with digital learning environment (Peters, 2000).
When I started taking Open Networked Learning course, for the first Topic 1, a scenario was highlighted covering all the above issues about online participation, digital divide and digital literacies among personal space and institutional space. I got an opportunity to discuss these issues in detail with a fantastic group of people from multi-disciplinary backgrounds. We discussed together the main problems that usually a person will and might face about entering into residential institutional space to get acquainted with online courses and writing blogs.
Within the concept of Problem based learning, it is a fun exercise to solve the above problem within a group where we connect, collect, contribute, collaborate and communicate from multi-talented people and share these knowledge to the outside world. I came to know about various technical terms within education arena and being myself as a learner within pedagogical domain.
My contribution to the specific problem focus area is about digital divide in education. The below padlet is the contribution from our group for this topic 1. Looking forward for more interesting discussions during the course of lecture.
References
Edwards, R., 2015. Software and the hidden curriculum in digital education. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 23(2), pp.265-279.
George, M.J. and Odgers, C.L., 2015. Seven fears and the science of how mobile technologies may be influencing adolescents in the digital age. Perspectives on psychological science, 10(6), pp.832-851.
Lin, M.H., Chen, H.C. and Liu, K.S., 2017. A study of the effects of digital learning on learning motivation and learning outcome. Eurasia Journal of Mathematics, Science and Technology Education, 13(7), pp.3553-3564.
Livingstone, S., 2012. Critical reflections on the benefits of ICT in education. Oxford review of education, 38(1), pp.9-24.
Peters, O., 2000. Digital learning environments: New possibilities and opportunities. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 1(1).
