Reflection on topic 1: Online participation and digital literacy

The scenario for topic 1 was:
“I have just signed up to do an online course and I am excited to be there. But I have little experience with online courses and it feels really challenging to get started to connect and find my way with all these new sites and tools. I guess that other participants will be more experienced than me and I feel stupid asking about things. We are asked to create a reflection on the web; it feels a bit scary to do this. I do share things on Facebook with friends, but here, in the open? I want to keep my private life separate from my professional life. But on the other hand, my students seem to share and discuss all sorts of things in social media and use all kinds of tools and resources.”

The group discussed “investment” for someone taking part online vs. face-to-face education in a classroom. The latter “costs” more. Also, we got a more passive “listening” culture in education related to lesser “investments” online. Concerning the personal and professional, we furthermore discussed morality; individual solutions based on moral stands when it came to how much one is open about oneself online.
Building on each other’s shares, creating a space where each one is feeling safe to ask and share, was another idea of a focus.

My own idea of a possible focus was if we could we speak about community, or nodes, of literacy (as in communities where both non-digital and digital competences are required)? What would the digital part be then? Not a technology driven perspective, but a human centered ditto. Another idea I had was how we could form a course, or a meeting, guided by the notion of “care”. Everyone in this particular course or meeting has a common task of some sort (beside the individual or private interest in the gathering), hence a common care of achieving it would be great. How could that be achieved even in shorter periods of time?

The focus we narrowed down was how to build on each other in participation in online meetings/education ans how to find a way concerning the privat and professional (having David White’s webinar on visitors and residents in mind). Nicolette suggested that we should dig deeper and found out more about these focuses. I found an article “Care, Communication, Learner Support: Designing Meaningful Online Collaborative Learning” (2017) by Robinson et al. from Online Learning using care theory. The article can be found through the link https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1163608.pdf

The focus in the article is on online collaborative opportunities, from a care theory perspective. The article adopts a sociocultural perspective, having a social constructivist view on knowledge. Difference between. Online classrooms and face-to-face classroom require new approaches, they argue. It is a descriptive study, focusing on what “the perceptions of instructors in higher education toward collaborative learning in the online classroom” are and what the experiences “faculty members identify concerning online collaborative learning”, regarding tools the instructors integrate into their pedagogy for collaborative learning and the opportunities for collaborative learning the instructors provide in the classroom (p. 30). The literature review is on constructivism and social constructivism; online learning; and collaborative learning. Under Methods they reveal their procedure in the qualitative approach was descriptive design with four cases. The study aimed at understanding collaborative learning in online education. Four instructors in higher education online courses took part. Three themes emerged: “the importance of online communication approaches, challenges and supports for online collaborative learning, and that care is at the core of online learner support” (p. 37).

The discussion in the group then soon started to have the focus structure vs. openness concerning the topic 1. This was also what we made a visual presentation of, posted in the larger ONL231 community. The important thing was the dialectic between openness and structure in online learning.

Concerning my thinking on sharing, it depends on the role I have. As an educator I can share examples of my research to students as well as examples of my own experience as a student or in the work life, but I try not to be private. In my private life, I am a bit cautious but share some of my private life in Facebook and Instagram. Things that cannot hurt me if commented upon.

My digital map looks a bit like this (in a verbal mode):
At work: E-mail, Canvas, You tube, Word and Adobe programs in my computer, Facebook (one rare time I created a Facebook group for a course), Instagram (during a trip with students) mobile phones (student making films), Teams, Zoom, Whiteboard in Zoom, Miro (although, not allowed by MDU)…
My private life: Writing on on a computer using word, E-mail, Facebook (although rarely), Instagram, Youtube, Streaming movies, casting tv, using the mobile phone as a computer, listening to books, radio, pods, and music.