Reflections on Topic 1 - Digital literacies

 

Photo by Derek Thomson on Unsplash

Hello everyone....Soniya Billore here and I will share some of my reflections on being part of the ONL202 course Topic 1: Digital literacies.

I must say that this topic opened some new doors for me - not only in terms of content and context but also for the tools we used to discuss and elaborate on the topic on digital literacies in our fun group PBL 13.

The topic was very relevant to the actual experience teachers, researchers and practitioners are facing in the new normal- how to deal with digitalization and use them effectively. Digitalization definitely creates lots of possibilities but it also opens its own unique can of worms !! Now if we really want to optimize the value and benefit of digitalization, we need to think about it through multiple perspectives and through a discussion be able to identify the points of leverage and points of pitfalls.

Our group did exactly this - 

We focussed on Digital literacies and Online participation and we brought in mainly 2 actors - the teachers and the students. The FISH model (Focus- Investigate- Share) approach was used to discuss, benchmark, and brainstorm on how the opportunities and challenges associated with digital learning can be handled. 

Healthy participation of teachers and students at an inter- and intragroup level is essential to create an ecosystem where all participants can engage with each other and together create and share knowledge. Highlighting this aspect the group discussions were charted and expressed as a Mind map through the digital tool called Coogle where we mainly looked into four aspects :

1. Literacies required for engagement with digital spaces

2. Involvement of students in the digital learning spaces

3. Involvement of teachers in the digital learning spaces

4. Encouraging the strategic mindset for sustainability 

The group has expressed a lot of ideas for points 1 to 3 but I feel that more can be done to elaborate on point 4 and we can put more to think about the sustainability of involvement, engagement, and participation strategies for digital learning. 

For me personally, this method of engaging with people has been very interesting and refreshing. First, I have made contacts with new people from near and far lands and with people from different fields of expertise. But we all discuss the same topic !!! This is really fantastic in the sense that it enriches our way of thinking with new knowledge, new insights and also helps to elaborate the common output that we want to produce with each topic in the ONL202 course. Secondly, I am able to learn new tools - this time we worked on Coogle, something totally new for me, and perhaps the next time it will be something else !! Well, for me, even working with Blogposts has been something new although I know that blogs have been around for so long now...

As I learn new tools I am actually looking forward to taking them to my class and asking my students to use them...I hope they will like it too :)

The ONL202 has begun really well and I look forward to working more. 

I hope we are able to meet each other in person too, sometime in the future.