[Photo by Craig Garner on Unsplash]

As I step into this new chapter of my life, being a student of Masters of Arts in Learning and Technology at Royal Roads University, then into the future self as a graduate. I have discovered just a few aspects of the digital presence that I would like to embody and how I can contribute to society. There are many more to reflect upon and discover as I dive deeper.

Then

For many years in the last 10 years, I considered myself to be a “Wellness Promoter”. I got certified as a Holistic Nutritionist, started a small side business, a website, a youtube channel, a Facebook page/community support group. I spent a tremendous amount of time curating daily engaging blog posts on my site, guest blog for others, Instagram, taught workshops and ran online wellness programs. My 5-year-old small business was finally taking off and from the digital presence’s perspective, I was doing extremely well. In reality, I felt tired and depleted on most days. So put the whole business on hold and quit social media and content contribution altogether. It was such a relief. I later realized that being constantly available for many faculty and students for my day job was already taxing, adding being on social media continuously stretching my focus too thin. That way of living did not align with the way I wanted to lead my professional and personal life. Much more boundaries needed to be in place and I needed to re-invent a new online self and contribute to society in a manner that will be congruent with my authentic self. Looking back, it was my way of cultivating digital literacy and “acquire their skills by simply playing around with media” (Jenkins, 2013)

Current Goals

I keep reflecting back on what it is that “something vitally that I want to share” (Jenkins, 2013) and what kind of digital and social footprint I want to leave behind as imaging “create a mock search result pages about your future self” Schryver, K. (2013, February 5) I believe this is to be a larger question than simply setting up goals for cultivating my digital presence and identity, it is identifying who I want to be as a person. This will require much more time to let things percolate, ideas to bud, and practice.

At the moment, my digital presence goal is to continue to be innovative with creating interactive and engaging learning content for my students. I would like to collaborate with other professors to create Ideas Share Space to collect effective learning/teaching approaches and pedagogical strategies for in-class, remote, and online teaching.

Strategies and Approaches

My social media of choice is LinkedIn as I am connected to my students, fellow educators, and colleagues. I would like to collaborate with other educators to create in-class and online workshop s) to identify “what does digital literacy look like in practice and how can it be thought or enabled” Ryberg. T., & Georgsen, M. (2010) to create a better, engaging, meaningful, and fun environment for my students to learn.  We can create an Ideas Share Space on Padlet for both educators and students to collaborate and give feedback then share the findings on LinkedIn.

Measures of Success

I will count this a successful mission if ALL of these statements are met for educators and learners:

• they are engaged with the topic during the workshop and on LinkedIn
• the time they invested is meaningful and purposeful
• they have fun
• they are eager to implement/experience these new ideas into their teaching/learning

One Last Thought

In the past, I would painstakingly identify my lack of technology, skills, and knowledge to procrastinate from creating. However, I am confident that I have cultivated enough (not all but enough) digital literacy to begin and will learn what is required when needed. A skill that I need to improve and continuously work on is the use of language as English is my third language. It is sometimes challenging, however, I am enjoying the learning process.

 

References

Kelly Schryver. (February 5, 2013 Tuesday). Guest Post | Who Are You Online? Considering Issues of Web Identity. The New York Times Blogs (The Learning Network). Retrieved from https://advance-lexis-com.ezproxy.royalroads.ca/api/document?collection=news&id=urn:contentItem:57NS-B791-DY2M-W4PJ-00000-00&context=1516831.

Jenkins, H. (2013, May 7). Henry Jenkins on Participatory Culture (Big Thinkers Series) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gPm-c1wRsQ&