OU blog

Personal Blogs

Anna C Page

H817 Week 12 Activity 23 Mapping visitors and residents

Visible to anyone in the world

Read the introduction to Visitors and Residents.

The Visitors and Residents approach has been used to map individual’s own engagement with different technologies using a grid. The horizontal axis represents a continuum from visitor use to resident use. The vertical axis can vary, but one commonly used labeling is personal to institutional. 

Create a Visitors and Residents map for yourself, considering the technologies you use (e.g. email, VLE, blog, Facebook, Skype, Google, etc.), using the personal/institutional axis as well as the visitors/resident one. There is not a definitive list of technologies, you should include any technologies you use regularly (for example, if you are a keen user of Flickr, add that). You can use a tool such as Word, or Powerpoint to create the grid, or a drawing package if you have one.

Blog your map and share it with other students.

Did you find this a useful way of considering technologies and how you engage with them? Were your maps similar to other people's? Were there difficulties in mapping some technologies?


White and Le Cornu’s (2011) ‘visitors’ and ‘residents’ response to the controversial ‘Digital native’ and ‘Digital Immigrant’ terms coined by Marc Prensky is much more compelling way to describe online behaviours than his rather simplistic theory. I found Dave White’s 3 October 2016 comment on his ‘Visitors and residents’ page in response to a question from Chrissie Nerantzi particularly helpful when he explained about the differences between visitors and residents behaviour on the web – motivation for engagement rather than technical competence is a key factor (White, 2016).

I recalled that in Block 1 Week 5 of H880 I did a similar mapping exercise as part of the MOOC we had to study in parallel to the module. So I revisited the mapping diagram I did (in PowerPoint) and revised it to show my current practice.

This was my practice in early 2019:

Anna Page 2019 Visitor to Resident map for both Personal and Institutional uses

This is my current visitor/resident practice in April 2021 (having done H880 Technology Enhanced Learning: foundations and futures, H818 The Networked Practitioner and H819 The Critical Researcher: educational technology in practice):

Anna Page 2021 Visitor to Resident map for both Personal and Institutional uses

I added the new activities in purple text. I didn’t shift any of the other elements as they all still seemed to be in about the right place on the Visitor to Resident continuum. I noted what I added was largely in response to the pandemic forcing OU staff (and many others) to work from home.

On the personal side, I hadn’t really thought to include my use of the MAODE VLE sites on the diagram in 2019 because I was only about 4 weeks into the first module. Another personal new addition is two instances of operating YouTube accounts – one for our little street organ (we made a video during Lockdown 1 plus some videos around Christmas 2020) and the other for the Music for All @ SMSG group, as we’ve had to take our events online (our 2020 organ festival plus a series of piano solo videos in 2021, which I have been editing).

Zoom has now appeared in the revised diagram more than once; mainly for Personal purposes (the OU doesn’t officially approve its use on OU computers because of security concerns, though some meetings with external clients are via Zoom). Adobe Connect is also something I use, though only for OU tutorials and I’m not very comfortable with it (especially the revised version). I’ve used other online conferencing tools a bit such as Blackboard collaborate at the OER20 conference (which was only a few weeks into working from home).

On the Institutional side, the new additions are directly pandemic related too. On the first day of OU staff working at home, our work team set up a WhatsApp group to keep in touch and encourage each other informally (our earliest exchanges were showing off pictures of our new ‘temporary’ office spaces, plus plenty of baking, with one colleague who went to live by the sea with his mother sharing his sea front walks with us). We had only just started using Microsoft Teams when the pandemic hit, and suddenly we found ourselves using it much more than we had ever used our Skype/Lync profiles (it is slightly more reliable though still throws us out of meetings randomly).

I’m also in several personal WhatsApp groups (family, friends, MAODE groups).

For both personal and Institutional purposes I’ve also watched YouTube live streams and sometimes commented in live chat.

See how crowded the map has become (my tired eyes can testify to the increased screen time in the past 18 months!), so if nothing else, this serves once again as a useful reminder to give myself regular screen breaks, even though an increased proportion of my life is now digital resident online.

References

White, D. and Le Cornu, A. (2011) ‘Visitors and residents: a new typology for online engagement’, First Monday, vol. 16, no. 9, 5 September 2011 [Online]. Available at http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3171/3049

White, D. (2016) Visitors and residents, on ‘Dave White – digital – learning – culture’ [online]. Available at http://daveowhite.com/vandr/ (accessed 18 April 2021)


Permalink
Share post

This blog might contain posts that are only visible to logged-in users, or where only logged-in users can comment. If you have an account on the system, please log in for full access.

Total visits to this blog: 38793