The first 2 weeks tackling this topic have been a learning experience, mostly confusing because were all trying to get ourselves familiar with the resources that we have to use. When tackling this topic I was asking myself what is digital literacy and in what ways am I digitally literate, the literature spoke on 2 concepts by Prensky that identified either someone being a digital native or digital immigrant. The topic forced me to take some time and figure out which spectrum I belonged to.
What is digital literacy?
Digital literacy is the ability to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, create and communicate information requiring both cognitive and technical skills(Sumney 2013). Marc Prensky proposes 2 concepts of digital natives and digital immigrants, a digital native is a person who has grown up in the digital age, rather than having acquired familiarity with digital systems as an adult and an immigrant is a person born or brought up before the widespread use of digital technology. Millennials (born between 1980-2000) could be considered digital natives as they have grown up with widespread use of technology and have an appreciation for it. Those born before the 1980’s are considered digital immigrants as they are fearful about the use of technology (Cut, 2017). Visitors and residents also use the online space for either institutional and personal reasons, when you are a visitor you are mostly prone to use the digital sphere for institutional work related tasks and would seldom use this for personal reasons and this is the latter for residents as they use the online space for every aspect of their lives. Residents tend to leave a social trace by having online accounts, the visitor leaves little to no trace online.
Reflection on topic 1
What I learnt from this topic is that age is not a determining factor as to which side a person is on, there are young people that are not so tech savvy and it would be misleading to assume that age determines anything. I am in agreement that that the visitor and resident labels should only be considered in the context that a certain tool is used. Also nowadays people make conscious decisions to not be part of this digital age as not everyone sees technology as a good thing, most of these individuals base their argument on the fact that social media doesn’t always make us social, that to some extent alienates us. What I discovered about me is that I am comfortably in the resident end of things as I use technologically in every aspect of my life.
References:
Cut, M. 2017. Digital natives and digital immigrants: how are they different. Available at: https://medium.com/digital-reflections/digital-natives-and-digital-immigrants-how-are-they-different-e849b0a8a1d3 [Accessed: 21 October 2019]
Fiona Wright, David White, Tony Hirst & Alan Cann (2014) Visitors and Residents: mapping student attitudes to academic use of social networks, Learning, Media and Technology, 39:1, 126-141, DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2013.777077
Summey, D. C. (2013). Developing Digital Literacies : A Framework for Professional Learning. Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin.
