The first topic we got to study during ONL252 was digital literacy.

As I understand the digital literacy or digital competence concept, it encompasses what you need to function in a world with digital services. As technological advances occur and patterns of behavior change, what is included in digital literacy changes. (Jisc infoNet 2014) Digital literacy is about how you find, receive, evaluate or enjoy, share and disseminate information. You can do this for many purposes, to enrich your free time, to perform at work, to market something or to make a decision about something.

I have learned that digital literacy can be said to be built up of 7-8 fundamental elements (Doug Belshaw 2012, Jisc infoNet 2014): e.g. cognitive, constructive, communicative, civic, critical, creative, confident, cultural (Doug Belshaw 2012). I now wonder if I have missed something essential in my previous description? At the moment, my thoughts don’t get started on these elements, but it certainly does for others.

I have also understood that there are those who liken digital literacy to a language, which you cannot or have difficulty learning to speak fluently unless you were born in the digital age (Jiscnetskills 2014). This analogy feels relevant, but can nurture a view of older people as dinosaurs that doesn’t really fit into the present and lead to age discrimination in different situations.

I reflect on the fact that different generations tend to have different platforms that they prefer to use (e.g. Bucht 2021). Does this mean that they have different levels of digital literacy or simply different digital literacy? Can the different digital literacy levels be said to be better or worse in general or can it only be linked to specific situations that the people who have the literacy are in? I draw the parallel between different platforms in the digital world and different restaurants and nightclubs in the city in the non-digital world. Different (age) groups prefer different places. This is certainly not a new parallel…

You can describe your digital literacy by drawing a map that shows where you are visitors and residents, and this can help you understand your own literacy and also be used for discussions about similarities and differences with others. (White, D. & Le Cornu, A. 2011) Personally, I am currently mostly a visitor on social platforms. I prefer to converse via direct messages to people I know. At work, we can have digital meetings and sometimes we send out advertisements for some event we arrange on social media.

One reflection I have is that one area of digital literacy is probably to set limits for how much you are online. Choosing time and tools that free up time outside the digital world. I think it’s good as a human being to just be in the real world sometimes for relaxation. I get the feeling that several experienced digital users who have been residents on several platforms have made this type of value decision and perhaps left some platforms/applications or whatever to call them because they did not provide enough value – perhaps to replace with others, perhaps to free up more free time.

Something that I take with me, David White said during the lecture he gave us on October 1st, 2025, that we as teachers can see ourselves as “Arbiters of connections”. It is something that I feel I can work on developing as in my professional role as an educator.

Doug Belshaw (2012) The essential elements of digital literacies, TEDxWarwick Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8yQPoTcZ78

Jiscnetskills (2014) Visitors and residents, Available from: https://youtu.be/sPOG3iThmRI?si=AOCuQvdhEFx0qdgi

Jisc infoNet (2014) Developing digital literacies, Available from: https://web.archive.org/web/20141011143516/http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/digital-literacies/

Bucht C (2021) Media Barometer 2019: Theme generations, Nordicom, Gothenburg. Available from: https://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:norden:org:diva-7231

White, D. & Le Cornu, A. (2011) Visitors and residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9).