Summary post for Topic 1

This fortnight was one of firsts for me – learning to harness the power and responsibility of a purely online module, a new area of study, formal peer-to-peer feedback and engaging with social media for not just personal interaction. As this is my summary post I will use it to not only analyse the topic itself but my experience and how I think I can improve.

 

Self analysis

Initially I found it somewhat daunting to post a response to the set question as I was unsure what approach to take -how make resources, what style etc. Being someone who is a less kinesthetic learner I deliberately held off posting until I had had the chance to read other people’s posts to understand how my peers were approaching the topic. In some respects this was a good approach as it gave me the confidence to then write my response to the question, knowing that the avenue I was pursuing was appropriate. However, this also meant I inevitably was influenced by the posts I had read and therefore found it hard to write my answer with feeling this influence. Also I realised the later an answer is posted the less likely you probably are to received more comments from your peers.

My points to take forward to the first assessed question:

• As I will have feedback from the teacher and have seen how posts have been done I will endeavour to try to produce my answer without first reading any of my peers posts. My peers posts can be read later to form a basis for discussion.
• I also noted I was using a much more formal style for my bibliography that some of my peers so I will try to use a less formal style next time.
• I found the bulleted posts a lot easier to read so I will use this technique where appropriate to make my content more readable.

 

Topic analysis

I think through my independent research I managed to produce a well articulated summary of White and Le Cornu’s concepts of Digital Residents and Visitors. My peers and I read each other blogs and used the commenting feature to raise questions and discuss varying themes related to the topic. I feel that as this was the first question we were all finding our feet a little and the discussion wasn’t as in-depth as it could have been – nevertheless it was a great example of the usefulness of peer-learning to introduce new resources, themes and feedback to help critical analyse a topic. My understanding of the concept changed from the start of the module as a model of two concrete user-ship types to at the end of the module as an incomplete spectrum covering behaviours that web users may show in some parts of their online existence and which may change over time. In our discussion we came to a consensus that White and Le Cornu’s model as it exist now is somewhat lacking. In my blog post and the later discussion I suggested there might be a better way of categorising the spectrum. One of my peers introduced me to Horrigan’s Typology of Internet users (2007) which classifies web users into 10 groups. This could be seen as an alternative to White and Le Cornu’s or potentially as a theory which could be integrated. We also discussed areas for further research into the application of technology usage in education and across different age ranges. However, as I have promulgated since the beginning is it really possible to create a perfect model of user-web interaction, given that the web and the way we engage with it is constant changing and that each user is user their behaviour and quite possible has multiple behaviours for different areas of their online presence?

 

Presence on the web

Since I started the module I have actively engaged with Twitter for the first time. My tweets do tend to be UOSM2008 or social-central so I need to work on focussing on career-oriented interactions. I have also set up an About.me page which I need to add more detail to and have started to grow my LinkedIn network – which I need to start expanding in a more profession direction, interacting with companies and suchlike. I did a search using pipl.com and 123.com to find traces of myself on the web and was pleased (and proud) to note that I have a clean digital footprint as far as these services can tell. I have also made a decision to keep my Facebook account purely for social interaction and have enabled the ‘do not appear in search engines’ feature as well as my existing privacy measures.