Aside from having to have one bite of everything on my plate, regardless of how many times I had tried it before being able to leave the dinner table, from a young age, I was taught to give people and things a second chance. I gave Moodle a second chance, and I’m not sure I believe that the third time is the charm.
Digital immigrants are those exposed to technology or computers later in life (Vodanovich et al., 2010). They are assumed to have shown or still show resistance to new technologies while having difficulty embracing them into personal and work practices (Wang et al., 2013). As a Gen Xer, I did not grow up with technology, but I have always prided myself on being an early adopter. I would consider myself “digitally fluent,” which is “the ability to reformulate knowledge to express oneself creatively and appropriately and to produce and generate information rather than simply to comprehend it” (National Research Council 1999, p. viii). This is, in part, what brought me to the MET program. I want to change how employee training and onboarding are conducted so that employees are set up for success and can continue to grow, develop, and earn promotions.
Perhaps I am less “digitally fluent” than I believe. I know that Moodle is not programmed to be intuitive to my neurodivergent (or perhaps neurosis) way of thinking. As a strategic storyteller, designing learning programs require the ability artfully develop the story via words, images, and multimedia. To keep a learner’s attention, the ability to move up and down and side to side helps create movement that brings the learner along with the story. Moodle seems to lack this ability and is only a monotonous page of scrolling. It does not have a built-in slider or image carousel to allow for moving side to side for images or slides – unless you know how to code it into your page – and as a digital immigrant, coding is not something I have mastered. Considering that my course is titled Storytelling and Presentation Skills, the irony of not being able to effectively design a module with movement and flow to build a story is disappointing.
While I am not a Moodle groupie, I did appreciate the simplicity with which an activity or resource could be added. This was particularly appealing in developing the exercises for the assignments I included within the course modules.
The question is whether my “digital fluentness” has been a figment of my imagination or if my classmates similarly found Moodle to be lacking in its usability and design capabilities.
References:
National Research Council (1999). Being fluent with information technology. National Academy Press, Washington
Vodanovich S., Sundaram D., Myers M.D. (2010) Research commentary – digital natives and ubiquitous information systems. Information Systems Research 21(4):711–723
Wang, Q., Myers, M. D., & Sundaram, D. (2013). Digital natives and digital immigrants: Towards a model of digital fluency. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 5(6), 409-419. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-013-0296-y