I’m mostly a visitor online, according to David White (2011) definition, and I’m not very presence online, expect things I have to do in work such as using e-mail, online teaching and meetings and our learning platform. I don’t post on social medias on daily basis, and then only for my friends, not public. I keep my professional and private online life strictly apart from each other, and I’ve not wanted or seen the purpose of mixing those two. During the last weeks, thanks to ONL, I’ve been thinking about it a lot and wondering why it is so and if I like to chance it.
My professional career has, before teaching, been in social works as administrator and leader in elderly care. It’s quite common, at least in Sweden, that people working in social care are exposed for threat or violence in their profession. It’s not either rare that clients contacts social workers through social medias, private messages och telephone outside working hours. As a leader I didn’t for example accept friend request on Facebook from my employees – not for that I thought they would talk about work in Facebook, but mostly to protect my privacy.
I think that still affects how I think about my online presence and that I find it inconvenient use my social media in work as teacher or communicate with the students for example by using WhatsApp, Twitter och Messenger, those are part of my private life. Recently I have had a group in WhatsApp with few students and it has worked great, so maybe I’ll chance my point of view slowly 😊
What still makes me hesitate is my considering that work and private life flows together and the borders will disappear. In Sweden we have plenty of people with sickness claims due stress and mental illness, caused by work. One of the risk factors is boundless work – we are reachable all the time, we work at home offices and there’s no longer clear borders between work and free time. How can I manage to handle this?
I’ve found out so many new online tools and programs during these two weeks so I definitely need, and want! to develop my digital literacies – there’s a hole new world with digital tools and possibilities out there!
Reference: White, D. & Le Cornu, A. (2011) Visitors and residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9).
Swati Jhaveri
March 26, 2022 — 1:42 am
Thank you very much for this sharing Karoliina. I also consider myself a digital ‘visitor’ using the David White typology. But your post made me consider a much wider range of reasons that might lead to someone preferring to be a ‘visitor’. Privacy has been an important factor for me but having read your experience, I realise just how critical privacy might be because of our historical experiences with digital tools and privacy. Interestingly topic 2 in this course is going to be about openness in learning and I think that will give us another opportunity to analyse and challenge our assumptions and understandings of privacy.
Bianca Crozier
March 28, 2022 — 8:45 am
Keeping your personal and professional life in digital aspects can be extremely hard as they do tend to flow into one another with such ease. Setting the boundaries in the professional instance is a good way of getting around that (especially with students). Start a WhatsApp group, lay out the ‘rules’ (only contact in these times, break the rules and lose the access). It is something that worked with me when using it for communication.
Linn
March 29, 2022 — 9:20 am
Thank you for your thoughts, I can understand where your coming from. As a teacher I have never accepted students as friends on Facebook before years after they have graduated. On LinkedIn, that I see as my professional tool, I again have almost all of my students. So I make a distinction between private and work related sites.
Sergey Korotov
June 6, 2022 — 11:06 am
Dear Karoliina. First of all, it was a pleasure to collaborate with you and other people in our group. During our join and individual work, and personal thinking on computer/digital literacies, web world and new trends in this changed (and changing) world of teachers-vs-students, I came to the same conclusion (like you) that inspite of loosing a part of our privacy when we use more (digital) channels in our professional life like whatsapp, facebook, etc, we get some extra and very useful (digital) helpers, too. It seems that it is unavoidable necessity especially in this completely new, pandemic and after-pandemic situation. During this summer I will try to learn some new useful software and some new features of e.g. canvas, etc. Best regards, Sergey.
karoaleg
June 16, 2022 — 1:29 pm
Dear Sergey, it was nice to learn to know you a bit and collaborate together. I wish you a wonderful summer, with some time off work also and not just learning new software 😊
Best regards, Karoliina