No Gravatar
Print Friendly

After I completed the Connectivism & Connective Knowledge course, I finally had a chance to read some of the Moodle posts that I missed during the course. A fellow course participant, Gus Goncalves, referred to Visitors & Residents presentation video by David White at Oxford University.   White’s presentation provides another excellent example of social & cultural perspectives on web 2.0 phenomena.  The important point made by his presentation is that if we want to understand how people are approaching digital space, it’s not entirely about technology, nor about skills or ages, either. It’s how people are approaching a given social space.  He gives an example of missing the point by offering a Twitter training session.  Twitter is social and cultural platform and you can only learn it by actually using it.

Some notes for the presentation are here.

The idea of the continuum of visitors and residents makes a lot of sense.  What sort of interactions or relationships are being formed in a given network is very much case by case even when the members happen to be all “residents.”  For example, White refers to the importance of the context for defining whether you are a visitor or resident in a given digital space.  You can be a visitor in one type of network and a native in the other.

The common or mainstream behavior in the digital space is branding one’s online presence by continuously updating status, feeding pictures, video and updating blog posts, etc. –”feeding the machine.”  This can be very banal, as White points out.  Connecting to the social network by itself does not necessarily create productive, learning experiences.

  • Communal does not mean that people are collaborating and cooperative.
  • Participants require a whole lot of other skills such as critical evaluation of research.

We are ultimately talking about social & cultural phenomena.  We are often referred by Web 2.0 experts to a collection of Web 2.0 tools like the image below:

web20logos

This can be a very misleading representation if we are pursuing more productive interactions as learning.  The image may be re-enforcing this idea that technical side of the skills and the volume of the tools are far and for most important.

Be Sociable, Share!