The weeks have gone by fast and we are now almost done with the course — so time is up for me to finally post my reflections on the topics we have been exploring together in the PBL groups and the broader ONL community. While I have been taking numerous notes as I have been working through the course materials and group work, finding the necessary time to reflect and to write has been a challenge. There is a silver lining though to me catching up with the blogging side of the course so late – as I write this now it is becoming clear that somehow I have been processing all the information without even realizing that this processing has been ongoing.
Now, I would like to revisit Topic 1 on online participation and digital literacies. I recall that getting to think critically about my own online participation and digital literacies was a humbling experience. To begin with, I had never thought about these subjects before early October when we started to work on Topic 1. I noticed early on that there was a clear excitement about David White’s engagement in the course so I watched the videos as well as the recorded webinar at the first opportunity I had. As I watched the videos I got a pen and paper out and drew a visitor and resident map [1] with blocks to illustrate my online engagement.
My visitor and resident map ended up looking rather clean:
Then, an interesting thing happened. In our PBL group we decided to share and discuss the results of our visitor and resident mapping exercise. When I saw the maps of my peers it became obvious to me that I might have been rather conservative with my criteria for the types of online engagement I chose to put on the map. For example, I did not mention the app used to manage nearly all interactions with the preschool which my son goes to as I did not see it as a form of online engagement at all — this app to me is more of a utility thing that I take for granted (how else these days would I keep up with what is going on at my child’s school?). Same was true for the online banking (I do all of it online), online shopping (I do nearly all of it online), as well as many other activities that have been effectively moved over to the online space — it is safe to say that I utilize these online activities to the fullest yet I apparently felt that none of these needed to be on the map. In the maps of my peers I could however see that they interpreted things differently — I liked it a lot as I could indeed learn from this leading to me becoming more aware of both my own online presence and my peers’ online presence too.
I would also like to comment on the digital literacies [2] — this part was particularly humbling because I used to consider myself digitally literate and, as I learned more, I realized that on the opposite I have got plenty to do to improve upon it. In the PBL group work we discussed the digital literacy frameworks and this was extremely helpful in systematizing my understanding of what digital literacies are and identifying the gaps in my competencies yet to be addressed.
Altogether, working though Topic 1 gave me greater understanding of my online participation and the levels of digital literacies — this has been serving as a foundation for the Topics to follow that I will soon write about in this blog.
References
- White, D. & Le Cornu, A. (2011) Visitors and residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9).
- Vuorikari, R., Punie, Y., Gomez, S. C., & Van Den Brande, G. (2016). DigComp 2.0: The Digital Competence Framework for Citizens. Update Phase 1: The Conceptual Reference Model (No. JRC101254). Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, Joint Research Centre. https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/digcomp
