This blog post actually treats two topics. The first one evolves around identity and the difference between private and personal. The second topic is about digital literacy, which I compare to being fluent within a language and knowing its grammar. Anyway, it turns out the two topics are related in such a way that writing about both of them made this endeavor easier for me while approaching the quite complex relationship between two phenomena – ”digital natives” and ”digital literacy”.
Being an ”immigrant” in the digital age, I am asking myself how to learn the language of my students, who are ”natives”. It is my intention to clarify why being a ”digital native” isn’t synonymous with possessing ”digitally literacy”. Doing so I prefer to draw a parallell to any language spoken by humans, so that literacy can be regarded as a set of rules, just as the grammar. However, in order to conduct my analysis, I also need to explore what is ment by ”identity”.
During the Open Networked Learning course I am taking at Karlstad University I had the opportunity to explore the concept of ”digital literacy” and a framework developed by David White introducing a space of visitors and residents, and two different contexts of technology use, namely personal and institutional. My group decided to, instead of regarding ourselves as immigrants, we would position ourselves, and a typical student, in the Visitor/Resident – Personal/Institutional space.
After some sketching on my profile, I soon realized that I am a visitor, however with a shift toward resident, depending on what tool I’m referring to. Perhaps most striking, I discovered that the tools I am using are grouped into two different practices according to a simple principle: I am resident in the way I apply a few digital tools within a professional, or institutional, context (for instance e-mail), while I am a visitor when it comes to social media used for socializing (for example Facebook), a fair representative of space for sharing personal content. The tool Blog turns upp with some interesting coordinates, just balancing between the two sub-spaces personal and institutional. One simple explanation is that I just happen to like writing.
Personal vs Private – two dimensions of human identity
But what do we mean by personal? I think my definition is slightly different from David White’s. Without contradicting his theory and framework, I will hereby introduce the term ”private”, and acknowledge the existence of a distinction between private and personal. From what I understand, David White coined a part of the digital communication space ”personal” while that space pretty much would correspond to what I would prefer to call ”private”. So in this blog post, I will simply replace ”personal” with the term ”private”, and, instead, the term ”personal” will later refer to something close to, simply put, a ”style of presentation”.
”Personal” can be seen as representing a nuance of ”private”. The difference is that, in the private mode, an individual reveals his/her true inner self, or core, identity, whereas in the state where an individual acts in a ”personal” manner, one only borrows a piece of ”private” translating it into a communication practice. My aim is to facilitate my understanding of the complexity of how our private sphere and innermost layers of identity interact with our institutional life in the digital age.
Let’s model humans as social beings and assume that we are all governed by some social and/or psychological principles. Let’s say identity consists of several layers, or several components, in line with most theories on identity. As most theories suggest, we will have a dimension closely related to how we were raised, how we communicated, how and what we learned, starting from early age, shaping our values and behavior on psychological level. Let’s associate the term ”Private” with this dimension. Second, we will also have a dimension of more social nature related to and shaped by our social relationships and social engagements, education, learning, communication, a summary of our experiences, including the traces of the societies we live in, that is, our culture. Let’s attach the term ”Personal” to this second dimension shaped by a mixture of culture, experiences, and practices.
The Private dimension of an immigrant
Now let’s try to apply the two dimensions ”Private” and ”Personal”, on different contexts, in order to position different activities in the Visitor/Resident space. For me and many ”digital immigrants”, ”Private” is the first dimension, which in my case is kept purely non-professional, while the second dimension – the socially shaped identity – might appear in many places of the Visitor/Resident space, including the Institutional half. This means that I can enrich myself through, even modify a part of my identity (the second dimension) with, new experiences of digital communication and technology tools. However, I do not trade my privacy nor expose my ”Private” self to the public. When acting within the Institutional space half, I can apply a ”Personal” touch to any performance or presentation, without interfering with the ”Private”.
Acting personal within the institutional space
I am a visitor in the digital landscape, and when online I am usually off the Private mode.
Within the institutional space, although a blog post, a lecture, or a presentation, might appear to be private, they most certainly aren’t, which I discussed in a previous blog post. However, presentations, teaching materials, blogs, etc, can be created using a touch of personal style or tone. The Institutional life, including teaching, can be filled with elements of ”Personal”.
I would feel confident while presenting different kinds of information, analog or digital, in a personal way. In a previous blogpost, I concluded that, from my perspective as a researcher, educator, and a former professional meteorologist, several parallels can be drawn between blogging, and situations where a professional enters a stage in order to present a piece of information to a particular audience, for instance teaching in higher education. Blogging is just like any other type of presentation. It incapsulates the same kind of performance, experience, and emotions.
In both cases – blogging and presenting content within a professional context, respectively – a level of professionalism is required, while a personal tone is allowed, if not desired. This is simply because no-one really wants to listen to a dull speaker. Information and knowledge is more easily digested if the presentation can offer a touch of surprise, a sense of dynamics, and a slice of personal touch. In addition, the odds of capturing the audience’s attention will immediately increase if the speaker can incorporate some kind of interactivity into the session, for instance by addressing the audience with a couple of questions instead of immediately jumping into the hardest fact content. To sum up, the basic ingredients for successful presentation of any category of information include these two important spices: a personal touch, and interactivity.
Social media is based on these two basic components! No wonder it is so successful, it is simply based on the basic rules previously practiced within the old school.
And social media is where the current student generation resides.
The Private dimension of the digital natives
What are the differences between the immigrants and the digital immigrants when it comes to how we use digital communication technologies? The two dimensions of human identity – here translated into the terms private and personal – suggest that digital natives are fostered differently than their teachers.
My point is that the new generations perceive ”Private” somewhat differently, based on the preconditions created by technology and communication practices younger generations were raised with.
When thinking about my students – the digital natives – their first dimension associated with inner identity, the ”Private” self, will probably be integrated with some digital communication technologies, whereas mine won’t.
The digital natives might relate to the ”Private” and ”Personal” in a different way. I believe they are strongly affected by their long and intense practice of communicating through digital technology, while being in the ”Private” mode. Online experiences have given these generations special skills and behaviors, some of which include being ”Private” within some contexts that would make other generations feel uncomfortable. Most important, the ease with which these digital natives seem to navigate around the digital landscape, can sometimes be misinterpreted for other types of skills. The confidence they show while just being in their private mode can be striking to us immigrants. But, the real reason might be as simple as that their sense of identity is strongly linked to digital tools and social media. Socializing through Facebook comes as natural to them as any other way of communicating. To me it doesn’t. I would never write anything too private and post it on Facebook, or anywhere else for that matter. My relationship with communication technologies was shaped by seeking information and digesting knowledge from books and lectures.
Digital literacy: Digital natives, immigrants, and grammar
So how digitally literate are immigrants, compared to digital natives? I am indeed literate, and from some point of view I may possess digital literacy as well, although I definitely see a need to freshen up some skills and, most important, add a long list of new tools to my list of skills within, in particular online, teaching. Next, I do know my content, and how to fill a presentation with content. Best of all, at some point in my early education, I learned to search information, value information, compare different sources of information, filter information, summarize, draw conclusions, and write reports where I apply some established knowledge, and add my own thoughts on top of the knowledge I have accessed and processed. Often I used pen and pencil to make notes and create my own summaries.
Obviously, I am literate. I also know a couple of foreign languages, including a beginners ”language of the digital age”. I know the basic rules. I just need to expand my vocabulary.
Maybe processing information can be compared to a grammar of a language. Learning a language then means we need to learn the grammar of that language. The grammar of digital information access and processing follows some basic rules, if it is done properly, and we must recognize and apply its basic components when analyzing information found online. If we do not know the grammar, we are lost, and we might entirely misinterpret the information! Even if we learn a million words, they might be useless if we do not know how to interpret them according to the sentence logic and grammar. We might be lucky when making a wild guess, but true knowledge requires deep knowledge of grammar.
Concluding, technology might be my second language because I am not a native, but very early I realized I need to be good at grammar. So, during the early days of the digital age, out of curiosity I started to learn some really basic rules. Then I learned some more. I have a solid collection of words creating a useful dictionary to start with, although I need to expand my vocabulary.
What about the digital natives? They are fluent in the language of the digital age, right?
In fact they aren’t, if we apply the idea of the grammatical rules.
Digital natives are, according to several observations I have made, stories told by colleagues, and the study my group conducted during the ONL course, equipped with impressive skills when it comes to fast searches, fast extraction of information, fast handling of information, however, they can perform poorly when it comes to source inventory, quality and credibility assessment, analysis, methodological approach, writing, and presentation. Is this because they tend to prefer passive forms of consumption such as videos, pictures and short messaging, before active participation like taking notes and perhaps sketching?
How does their knowledge translate to grammar and vocabulary?
Many students have an amazing vocabulary, they know volumes of words, they have an accent of a native. Therefore they appear to be fluent and literate. They have a large collection of books in their library, and they are familiar with different dialects and customs in different parts of the country of the digital natives. However, I propose that the digital natives lack with something fundamental. They have never properly learned the grammar of the language of the digital age. They have words, but no grammar, or rules, to guide them in order to fully understand the actual meaning of the words once put into sentences. To their defense, one very good excuse for their poor grammar is that no-one could teach them correct grammar, because their parents, actually their teachers too, were all immigrants, and as immigrants it took at least a decade for teachers and parents to learn the new language of the digital age. However, since parents and teachers are analog natives, they know the grammar of the grammar of the analog language very well.
As teachers we should try to reach the students with communication practices that might feel natural to students. However, because digital literacy is not synonymous with being a digital native, despite the fact that the digital natives are practically born into communicating digitally, as teachers we have large responsibility to teach not only content, but how to approach information in a systematic way. Teaching the grammar of the language of the digital age. Because we are experienced, trained and literate, we can apply the rich language skills we possess within the language of the analogue age, translate the grammatical rules to suit the digital age, and pass them on to our students.
So, it is a necessary step for me as a teacher to explore how to transfer the grammar from analogue to digital, and to increase my vocabulary as much as I can by continuously practicing the language.