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| Image Credit: Cognigen |
Maps and Me
As an Eagle Scout, an avid road-tripper, and a distribution manager who did his fair share of dispatching trucks, it is fair to say that I know a thing or two about reading maps. But I'd never thought about mapping my digital activity before today.
Digital Mapping
Digital mapping isn't a route to a destination, but rather the plotting of the apps and websites one uses most frequently along 2 continua: personal to professional use on the vertical axis and visitor to resident use on the horizontal. This layout and these terms are the work of David White. You can learn more about his work from him at his blog, but I have plotted my own digital use map and I'd like to share it with you below.
| My Digital Map. Layout my own; individual image credits: Google Images |
Note that this map does not represent where I will be forever with these tools but where I think of my use of them today.
Visitors and Residents
The first thing that's apparent about my map is that I use Google search for a lot of different purposes, from personal to professional. But no matter the domain I am using it as a Visitor. According to this model, a visitor activity is one that use use like a tool--you select it, use it, and move along. The opposite side of the coin here are Resident activities, which for me include the personal-resident use of Twitch and Google Hangouts, and the professional-resident use of Google Classroom. Resident activities are those where the user goes online intending to interact as part of a community, to cultivate interaction and to be a part of something. As I plotted my digital map I found it very interesting that many apps I use in both a personal and professional setting could be used for different levels of residency depending on the user's aim. If I were to come back to this activity in 3 months, would I move my Blogger and professional Twitter accounts more toward resident? What new apps would I have found, and which current apps would fall out of use? Do you have any apps I have to use? Let me know!
This is such a good post! Your opening comparison had me interested to read more, and I appreciated the notion that this is not your "final destination" map but a snapshot of this moment in your digital life.
ReplyDeleteThank you for the positive feedback! Pretty sure my map would change today if I re-did it so yes, very much a snapshot.
DeleteHi Domenic,
ReplyDeleteI love the layout of your post! I agree that for today, this is a great snapshot; but in the future who knows where we will be in our maps! I am learning more about myself with each assignment and feel that we will be grow more by the end. Google was my "big" visiting tool as well. Just made me think; what did we do before Google? Such a crazy thought! I have never heard of TV411; interesting! I will be doing some research after I post here! LOL! Thank you for sharing your map! Great job!
Toni
My wife is a school librarian and she has a coffee mug that says, "Librarians: the original Google". TV411 has some great resources for older learners related to life skills, money math, etc. I used it quite a bit this past semester in my daily vocational lessons.
DeleteHi Dom,
ReplyDeleteWe meet again from another education course.! As a fellow scout ("girl" scout and wood badge leader - 3 weekends of leadership training in the woods), I enjoy following a trail. You have a beautiful blog site with great information. I'm totally new to all of this technology. I guess I've spent too much time outside! Please continue to leaves the bread crumbs for me to follow. You provide inspiration on how to enhance my work in becoming a better communicator. Just like trails in the woods, digital mapping displays many avenues and sources on how to get to your destination. Thank you.
It is good to hear from you again Linda. I think as long as we are learning then a bread crumb at a time is just fine. There's definitely no benefit to diving in headfirst to every tech tool out there and feeling overwhelmed. But I'm sure you will integrate tools that work for you along the way. Let me know if I can help!
DeleteHi Dom – let’s try this post again.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree that when looking at your digital map, and how it represents you now, it leaves you with a sense of maybe where you need to be or in what direction you need to go. Most of the visitor activities in our day to day are used as tools to reaffirm or clarify what we are doing at a particular moment in time – and like you said, move along right after. The resident activities are more community where you’re sharing information back and forth with colleagues. In your professional setting, do you find that being a resident in some of these tools, really helps you in the classroom when teaching? A lot of our resident tools at work, like all things google/smartsheets, etc., have really helped finding the necessary resources that often times a Google search doesn’t produce – reaching out to colleagues and being able to rely on that group has saved me from making a few mistakes .
Pearl -
DeleteThanks for the questions. I know that for me, Google Classroom really helped in that resident-nature due to the nature of most of my lessons. Since I was pulling students out of their classes, it was a way for them to be connected to a larger community and for me to stay in touch with them and their learning even when they weren't in my classroom for the day.