“Digital Tove” – when did I start to use digital means? It was in the mid-90’s when I got my first email and also mobile phone. These devices did evolve a lot and rapidly from that and my digital competence grew by trying to keep up with the development of digital presence – starting from company webpages creation and towards the exponential explosion of webcontents and co-creation of contents like Wikipedia or Facebook. I joined Facebook already in year 2008 when it was a requirement in a leadership course I attended = I got 30 friends from the start by connecting to the other ones participating in the course. We also tested Second Life avatars https://secondlife.com/ and that was really something amazing at that time to experience – especially the feeling of flying that you could experience through your avatar. I guess I got a Twitter account also then or a bit later…but have never got the feeling for that platform. I also joined LinkedIn early on – and it has been interesting to follow from a tool for storing your CV to an interactive platform that enables good contents sharing and matching professional people well.

With PBL08 we did a check of our “Digital Footprint”, which is done by entering your own name into Google and checking what it brings up about you, in which order, good or bad stuff? This is recommended to be done both on texts coming up in the search as well as images. The questions is what kind of digital identity it shows for you? Is there stuff that brings down your image, and/or stuff that enhances your personal brand? Is there stuff that should be removed, and is it at all possible to remove? In my case I felt ok with the texts that Google showed – some old news of course when I had got new job positions or from some older interview of me. – but all of these gave an ok picture of me. But I did not check this with another browser…suddenly I remember a course I had on Vocational level where we tested to google some things on different browsers and got totally different resulus in comparison…so I should google myself with different browsers, I guess?

Webinar 6.10.2021 by David White: Visitor-Resident, Institutional – Private, Credibility. This webinar of his with mapping collaborative and the YouTube videos of his that one could check before the webinar gave good insights into his model for how to map your digital presence. I really like how this model can make you see your digital activities from a new angle. The mapping assignment during the webinar also visualized well his model and made me realize I left out some parts or did not see some parts like Google itself as it is so self evident. It was also interesting to see other peoples mappings and how different views there were. Videos explaining his model are in this link and as more pops up when you watch one, start here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO569eknM6U

What did my analysis of my own digital presence show me? First of all I am resident in many tools – some as leisure and some as job tools. But I guess that is how it is today. Then sometimes I try some new tools and that again might become just a Visitor thing – especially if it requires registration and alike when I just want to see if it is useful before signing up for it…But if I manage to test it I can become more resident in it. A fairly new tool for me to use is JamBoard https://jamboard.google.com/ and SessionLab https://www.sessionlab.com/. The latter I think is very interesting as it both helps you plan but also provides a toolbox for methods to use depending on the topic and purpose of the session one is planning. Jamboard, Miro, Padlet and alike are excellent tools for being co-creative and work collaborative – ways of teaching and learning I like very much.

What ONL might mean for my development?

With the PBL08 group it is interesting and fun to explore online possibilities for teaching. Another perspective it gives is how we as a group formed during the first weeks of the course – with all normal struggles to get to know each other and interpreting the assignments and methods and tools to use. It is interesting to see how differently we have understood some instructions or the aims – exactly as our own students probably experience when we introduce a course and all parts and assignments in it…really good to realise that “old” knowledge about groups bonding through a process of chaos in the start to smooth cooperation after a while still applies.

The pandemic forced us all to be very agile and creative when we took for classroom designed lectures into the digital space – the giant digital leap is done! But there was a lot of good stuff and experiences of online teaching already before the pandemic hit us, and now I hope I can learn from peers good practises from those times but also how they have evolved now during the pandemic. As well as new practises and tools used by peer lecturers during the pandemic. I hope ONL will give me perspective and new angles on what digital literacies consists of – and a lot of courage to test new methods and approaches in the digital surrounding!