The most important things that I have learnt through my engagement in the ONL course are
- that digital literacy does not depend on age but on a person’s motivation to engage,
- that digital tools can enhance teaching and learning significantly, and
- that one’s personality and culture can have an important impact on collaboration and teamwork.
1. David white showed us convincingly that digital literacy does not depend on age but on a person’s motivation to engage. I can confirm that my motivation and my engagement in teaching technologies has increased by participating in the ONL course. However, we know that digital literacy is composed of different skills. Therefore, I would not call myself digitally literate yet. But, I think I am on a good path to become a digital literate person.
2. I got to know a lot of new digital tools: collaboration tools like Padlet, ThingLink or Prezi and new social media/blogging platforms like Twitter and WordPress. By using Padlet, ThingLink and Prezi for our group presentations, I also got to understand their advantages and disadvantages or better yet, their potential and their limits. This definitively helps me to choose “the right tool” for my teaching and learning. I became much more secure in using them and I can’t wait to integrate them (especially Twitter as I have already described in my 3rd blog). I am convinced that digital technologies make the whole teaching and learning process much more engaging – for my students and for me as an educator.
3. My PBl group consisted of people from six different countries. It was an incredible enriching experience I wouldn’t want to have missed. Like in all of the teams, there were also in our team people with different levels of engagement. I think that’s normal. There are multiple reasons for this. Maybe the workload of the course was too high and incompatible with the everyday work or personality traits like introversion affected a person’s level of commitment. All in all – I think – we solved our problems well. I would never have related certain problems to our different cultural backgrounds until the last week of our course when 1. someone related my dominance behaviour in the group to my German background and 2. a member of another PBL group brought up the topic of a predominant Scandinavian way of working together within the ONL course. It is an interesting and also delicate topic and cannot be discussed in a satisfactory manner here. But I can say: it brought me to think!
A result of my participation in the ONL course is that I want to continue to develop my digital literacies by taking other courses at the university. The Centre for Development of Teaching and Learning at the National University of Singapore is offering different courses in this field and I am highly motivated joining some of them. I will also vouch for the ONL course amongst my colleagues at the Centre for Language Studies.
Last but not least, I would like to thank Alan Swee Kit Soong from the National University of Singapore for giving me the opportunity to participate in this course.
