Digital Confidence Profile:

My Digital Profile

Find & Use: Comfortable Create & Innovate: Comfortable Identity & Wellbeing: Comfortable Teach & Learn: Confident Tools & Technology: Comfortable Communicate & Collaborate: Comfortable

To be honest, I have never reflected on my digital skills. I have always believed that I can do good and knowledgable presentations and reports in terms of academia, and in real life, I am confident in tools and technology. I never thought about assessing each detail like Find & Use or Identity & Wellbeing. All of this changed once I did my digital profile and then reflected on the article below.

Knowing the Difference Between Digital Skills and Digital Literacies, and Teaching Both: 

Digital literacies are not solely about technical proficiency but about the issues, norms, and habits of mind surrounding technologies used for a particular purpose —Doug Belshaw, educational researcher” (Bali, 2016). This sentence caught my attention, as when I hear digital literacies, my mind instantly translated that it it technologically related in terms of proficiencies. The fact that there is a difference between digital skills and digital literacy confuses me somehow, as all my life I didn’t know this difference. It is my first time to hear the term “digital literacy”. From what I read in the article, I understood that digital literacy is about the wh questions and is about the norms and issues surrounding technologies used for a certain purpose, while digital skills are about how and what. There is an activity we did in class, where basically we were leaning what images to use, recognizing copyrights licensing, and much more; After reading the article, I realized that this activity was all about learning digital literacies. I believe that this is reflected on my digital profile, where I am comfortable with Find&Use. In my academic life, I use digital literacies in many situations specifically in presentations. I get to choose which images to insert in the slides, and citations too, while for digital skills, I got to choose which tool to use like Powerpoint or Canva. “After students have the skill to use multiple platforms, I allow them the choice of which platform to use for the support they need” (Bali, 2016); Definitely that is a thing we learned in our class. For instance, for the game we are constructing, we got to choose what suits our game best from Google Forms and Google Slides. Experimenting with both taught me a lot, as I started with Google Forms, but midway, I tried Google Slides based on my colleagues’ recommendations and it was visually appealing much more and more entertaining despite the fact that it is the same exact game.

For critical connection, we did many activities about understanding privacy, wellbeing and security such as the Data Detox Kit each one reflected on (https://datadetoxkit.org/en/home/). However, I felt that in Soliya program – a private domain-, we were required to discuss somehow sensitive topics. This also might open avenues for abuse not necessarily public domains like Facebook only. Moving on to using judgements, I feel that when I search for somethings, this is because I need to learn it or I don’t even know anything about it. In this case, how can I use judgements on a topic I don’t even know? For the case of Wikipedia, it is the first thing that appears, so I agree that this doesn’t mean it is the ultimate source. They play on the Search Engine Optimization to be on the very top of the Search Engine Results Page by using the most effective keywords and content. Overall, now I understand the objective of some activities we did in class, which opened my eyes on many things as discussed.

Reference:

Bali, M. (2016, February). Knowing the Difference Between Digital Skills and Digital Literacies, and Teaching Both. International Literacy Association. Retrieved from https://www.literacyworldwide.org/blog/literacy-now/2016/02/03/knowing-the-difference-between-digital-skills-and-digital-literacies-and-teaching-both

Taught Pathway

From: https://www.allaboardhe.ie/stations/

Presentation Skills:

I chose this board, as I have been working on enhancing my presentations skills for a while. I even took business communication course to help me be a better presenter. This will help me in professional presentations in any company or even in interviews. I want to talk with confidence as much as it can get and be able to represent any individual or company I will work with in the future. The learning objectives for this lesson are:

https://www.allaboardhe.ie/AAlessons/presentation/story_html5.html?lms=1 Then, I chose to reflect on effective delivery specifically to complete my learning journey of being a better presenter over choosing how to plan a presentation, as I have been trained for this skill in all my major courses. I will reflect on what I learned in a form of a list, so that others can learn it effectively. First of all is delivery:

  1. Body language should be minimal not to distract your audience but interactive at the same time to not be like a statue. It includes gestures facial expressions. Something I learned from another course is to take cultures into consideration, as each one is different, and you may do something as a presenter that is disrespectful for one of the audience. Also, never forget to smile!
  2. Have clear voice and an understandable pace
  3. Vary your pitch and never sound monotonous
  4. Engage your audience (for example: ask rhetorical questions). This requires a verbal connection, as speaking directly to them.
  5. Use visual aids in the presentation
  6. Maintain eye contact (There is a hack I learned, which if you are not comfortable to look people in the eye, look right on top of their heads. This will give the effect of maintaining eye contact)

This video is a great example to watch and learn from all the previous points. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y66YKWz_sf0

Moreover, dealing with nervousness is very important and tricky. The key to master it is being well prepared for the presentation and practicing. There are a lot more things that I learned in this board, but I believe that experiencing it yourself is more enjoyable than me listing what I learned. I don’t want to take from anyone’s learning process. The quiz at the end gave me the chance to reflect on what I understood from the activity and how much I took out of it. Surprisingly, I learned more than what I expected.

Referencing, Citations and Publications: 

As a second choice, I chose this board, as in my business major, we depend so much on research for reports and so on. I felt that I will discover new things like I did in the presentations section. I want all my work to always be credible with the perfect citations and references, as for my work life, it will be a very important aspect. Here are the objectives of this board:

For my reflection, I will focus the most on referencing. One of the points is that references are used to inform the readers where the information is from and that they MUST have the ability to follow up with the origin of the source. I totally agree with this point, as I will feel shadiness if I found any work without references or untrustworthy ones; however, I found out that common knowledge may not be cited and that’s acceptable.

https://www.allaboardhe.ie/AAlessons/referencing/story_html5.html?lms=1Most of this board was general knowledge or maybe it’s because we took orientations on at the university. The board discussed the types of citation – in text and references list-, styles like APA or MLA, different ways of how to include citations, and much more. I am familiar with all of it maybe also because of practicing it almost daily.

 

Final Reflection:

While checking the boards, I found out that they are related to the categories of the digital profile. I got really excited, as I felt that the whole assignment as linked tightly and I saw it. I was very conscious while choosing to try different experiences and learn diverse skills. I chose Teach & Learn and Find & Use. The presentation skills was very beneficial; however, the references, citation and publications added almost nothing to my knowledge. It was very boring too. The presentation skills board included videos and visuals to keep it interactive, while the other one did’t. At first, I felt that this assignment was going to be very academic, boring and long, but I found out that it taught me things for my career and future not only university. Also, I learned the difference between digital skills and digital literacies, which was the highlight of this assignment. I never focused on the difference, but it will make me conscious while working on anything technology related. I will definitely try other pathways to learn from, as I feel that may be even more interesting.