Visitor or resident?

So, based on the video above by David White of the University of Oxford and his model people can be classified as belonging to two groups: visitors and residents. Visitors are said not to leave traces behind, say you went there and left. Residents on the other hand involves more engagement and having a presence online.

Obviously there is more than one dimension on all of us for the many different aspects of out lives. We can be visitors of airlines websites but residents of chatroom or forum websites, for instance. There is another difference highlighted by David White is the additional perpendicular dimension to being visitor or resident, the personal or institutional persona acting as a visitor or resident in each case or website.

The question now is: who are we in this context? The answer obviously changes from person to person. I personally think that there is a missing dimension to this plot and it’s the time dimension. This comes as an obvious statement but I myself have been in and out of the different dimensions. I have two experiences in particular regarding this: My private blog when I was at university stage and my chatroom for students when I was teaching at high school level.

I was a digital resident during my days of university with my personal blog. I used to share stories, jokes, thoughts, pictures, and so on. This part of me I left behind as I grew older and there is a small part of me that misses that online semi anonymous confession booth. My institutional persona was also a resident in a chatroom when I was a teacher at a high school. It all began to try to fill in the gap of my presence at the school as I didn’t have to go there all the days of the week and otherwise I would meet the students only once a week.

I think my little experiment of the chatroom was a rather successful one. The students seemed to be engaged by having a teacher using the tools they used in their lives as younger generations were definitively more residents of the digital world than most of their teachers.

Because at that point I was also barely older than the students and the digital world just started to bloom I was still very digital literate in the tools that the students used/needed. The world has certainly advanced and it is time to pick up the pace again. This brings to the the next subject, what is digital literacy?

From the text Developing digital literacies (2014) JISC guide digital literacy can be seen as composed by seven different elements as seen here:

I didn’t create memes or redirect them to wikipedia articles as those resources didn’t exist at the same level as they exist now or not at all. Obviously the challenge was always to find credible information online; Fakenews where not as popular as they are today but misinformation has always being present online. So what I did was to use usual book figures and doodle explanations on top of them and send those files accompanied by the chat to the students. I think they appreciated the effort but unfortunately it took rather long to answer all the questions that came up. It was particularly difficult to find information in Spanish (my mother tongue). I would have welcome some media banks for images and videos like they exist today.

For a thought provoking video regarding credibility see below.

Let’s see where this ONL191 would take me.