Cumulative critical review of Learning.

Throughout the completion of this module I feel that I’ve learned a lot of things that are highly applicable to my life and my career in the future. The completion of the digital badge assignment has really prepared me for an array of obstacles and information that I may face online. Each digital badge has its own lesson and each lesson had an impact on how I viewed my digital footprint and my ever-expanding digital literacy, that I gained through the help of this module.

The first digital badge involved making a blog to publish all the digital badge assignment work on. Making the Blog was fine but, Publishing a video of myself for my peers to review was quite the daunting experience, but I found that both giving and receiving feedback was really valuable for my learning and I can now apply what I have learned to better my experiences as an active learner. Digital badge two involved us having to make a Pinterest profile, a pocket account and make a personalized map on my google maps. I found this quite interesting as it thought me about the management of multiple social media accounts. The management of multiple social media platforms is more difficult that it appears to be, this is mainly because of the abundance of information and social media platforms that and these social media platforms can change us and how we act. The third digital badge involved the use of a screen casting application to record a short video, edit it using the built-in editing software on YouTube, and then upload it to YouTube, what surprised me most about this badge was the fact that YouTube had built in editing software that was available to all creators for free, cutting out the need for external software. The fourth and final digital badge involved the creation of a privacy policy that had to be written with the best interests of the user in mind. I chose to write the privacy policy for twitter and the policy I wrote is arguable ideal for the user but not very realistic in regard to Twitter. Overall, the digital badge assignments really fine tuned my knowledge on digital literacy and my digital footprint.

When it comes to my prior knowledge about the world wide web, digital literacy and my digital footprint, its safe to say that I only had a very surface level noesis of them, as any layman would. I knew the basics, but in the long run, I really had no idea what was really happening to my data and information that I was putting online. I would say that my lack of prior knowledge really encouraged me to want to know and understand the complexities of digital life and to learn how to apply them to my education, future career and life online. The biggest issue I encountered during this module was trying to fathom why users would willingly give their information to social media giant like Facebook and Twitter? I soon realised that although these platforms are becoming integral parts of our everyday lives, we have all, at one point or another, experienced a loss of control over our personal data, and we accept this because we don’t know any better. Social media platforms use clever phrasing and tactics to make us think that or information is being protected but in reality, much of our data is being sold, and that’s because we allowed it by unconsciously accepting terms that we didn’t understand (S Abiteboul, 2015).

I was surprised to find out that all of the digital badges involve the need to record a video of our learning experiences for our peers to review, after completing this a few times it became easier and I became used to it as the digital badges went on. The use of peer feedback really helped me understand the work I was doing to a higher degree as I could observe what other students were doing similar to me and what I was doing that may not have been the same as my peers. It was quite interesting getting to review my peers as it really gave me a chance to gather new perspectives that I may not have considered in the first place. The only problem that I had with the peer review system was that it wasn’t anonymous and a lot of the time, it was my friends reviewing my work. Studies show that student are more likely to give more critical feedback if the reviews were anonymous (Ruiling Lu, 2007).

In conclusion, I found this module and the digital badge assignments quite interesting, I plan on applying the information I have learned through this module to gain a job within social media and hopefully one day have a positive effect on how the user experiences social media as a whole. I have been currently carrying out digital literacy info sessions with my family and friends because I want them to be as digitally literate as I have become and I believe that they should understand hwo to protect their privacy and data online.

Bibliography

Ruiling Lu, L. B., 2007. A Comparison of Anonymous Versus Identifiable E-Peer Review On College Student Writing Performance and the Extent of Critical Feedback. [Online]
Available at: https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://scholar.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1002&context=efl_fac_pubs
[Accessed April 2020].

S Abiteboul, B. A. D. K., 2015. Managing your Digital Life. [Online]
Available at: dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2670528
[Accessed April 2020].