The Plan to Support the Cultivation of my Digital Presence and Digital Identity within the MALAT Program

After mapping my individual engagement with the Web using the Visitors and Residents continuum (White & LeCornu, 2011), I thought about how my online activity has changed over the last ten years. Initially, my online activity was strictly as a visitor, seeking information and guidance, saving my talking for off-line. However, I recognize a movement towards the resident’s side, where I am sharing information about myself, including my activities and thoughts. I find this fascinating because traditionally, I have always been a very private person. I am surprised at my current level of presence on social media, mainly Facebook.

My overall goal and purpose for cultivating my digital presence and identity is to find ways to gravitate to the resident side of the continuum. I am not saying that existing on the visitor side is a bad thing. White and LeCornu pointed out that a visitor’s technical and intellectual skills may even be greater than those of residents (2011). I am saying I’d like to experiment with digital online presence through a different lens.

While attempting to move closer to the resident side of the continuum, I will begin with increasing the number of blog posts in WordPress to two per month. The skills I will need to develop for this goal are critical thinking and academic writing, two of my personal weak areas.

The strategies for addressing my critical thinking and academic writing learning gaps will be to continue reading and writing within the MALAT program and to review activity and assignment feedback from instructors. As well, I plan to seek guidance and mentorship from the RRU writing center and especially my cohort; I am lucky to be with several amazing thinkers and speakers. At the end of every month, I plan to review the goal (posting at least two additional entries in WordPress per month) and in three months, I will revisit my plan and redo the mapping.

White, D. S., & Cornu, A. L. (2011). Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v16i9.3171