Wednesday 13 May 2020

literaties .... but digital ones?

Who am I in a digital age? First of all my problem was to know what digital literacies mean. I had no idea of the dimensions that could be taken in consideration, about the expectations one - as me - would be confronted with in her job. The dimensions suggested by White and Cornu (White, D. & Le Cornu, A. (2011) Visitors and residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9).    were easy to understand an a first raising of consciousness about my personal positioning in digital contexts. I was surprised to hear that it is not about being young or "more experienced"  - to become digitally literate - ...what a relief....it's more about how I would like to expand my current literacies and what to develop for a future identity in a digital context. It was interesting to see that I had more residential spheres than I would have said before we elaborated our map during this first webinar on topic 1. I felt like being on the pole of "no literacies" finding myself with Iphone, laptop and piece of paper to get my literacy positioning done, switching between several opened web-pages - almost all of them rather new for me... and beyond this: All in English.... as you have noticed, not my "homerun". 
Even more surprised I was when I heard myself say that I would be OK for leading the first - this - topic ..... after a long period of silence in our pbl group (at least it felt long). When we started I was not prepared how I should have been. I had problems to understand some of my pbl-group members (due to different English sounds, to pronunciation, to transmission qualities and very fast speaking). My ears went crazy, trying to understand all that was said in our first meeting(s) and I was sure to miss the really important points for sure. It was great to get help and facilitation, to express " not knowing" or "not yet understanding". I think to remember that it was about the third meeting when I began to relax a little bit, when there where first jokes in the group and the humor became visible when we first worked in collaboration online. 
Before attending this course I was sure to not register online for a tool I did never see, never use, not knowing how to use the tools offered inside.... but I did and it was a mixed feeling of excitement and apprehension of leading the group in a chaos. 
It was good to know (from former meetings) that it is ok to wait some moments for opening documents, finding drives and folders, defining the right type of a document to let us all together work on the same file. Otherwise it would have been a difficult part of my very fresh online learning journey.... 

Looking back to this moments, I realized how important relation and trust building in an online learning community was and is and that leading this group building processes is part of a competency that one should elaborate ... to facilitate and foster online learning in groups. 

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literaties .... but digital ones?

Who am I in a digital age?  First of all my problem was to know what digital literacies mean. I had no idea of the dimensions that could be...