1. My Digital Confidence Profile

You know the type of facebook quizzes that lets you answer a bunch of questions and then tells you what type your personality is? Well, that’s not entirely the case here but it’s pretty similar. Here you have my “digital” profile, I don’t think you can really tell much about me from it but at least you’ll know that I’m comfortable most of the time. At first, I got excited about the quiz because I thought they would analyze the answers we picked and in the end give us a brief personality description however they don’t really do that. Instead they just show you a pie-chart and just arrange your answers and that’s literally it. I didn’t learn anything about myself from the quiz, I basically chose the answers and then nothing.. As you can see I need to work more on my digital skills so that next time I take the quiz I’ll be confident in all aspects and not just one.

2. Digital Citizenship

Skepticism, that’s a word I find myself hearing a lot lately. For me it makes so much sense that Dr.Maha Bali started her article by talking about it. I feel like it hasn’t always been clear the meaning behind critical thinking and the layers behind it. So, when I read the part about “reconsidering what we mean by critical” I paused to think for a minute. Honestly, I can see why skepticism as a concept is overly used in Egypt. For so many years you had to believe what was given to you as mere facts, then with the 2011 revolution, people started feeling like so maybe everything is not as it seems. Empathy is not always easy and needs effort that most people are too lazy to exert. There is a sentence that I really liked and if I could I would just try to make as many people as I can read it and truly understand it which “Empathizing with and trying to understand the point of view of the “other” first, in order to engage with them instead of approaching them with skepticism.” Lately I have been trying to have more empathy in my life and I feel like the digital world has definitely helped me.

So what does digital citizenship mean? It is basically like global citizenship but in the digital world. Like it was written in the article we can call it global digital citizenship because it is both after all. What I really like about this concept is that it connects people together on a deeper level without even seeing each other. It is so weird how you can be affected by something happening literally thousands of miles away just because of a picture you saw or a post from someone there. Some people would think that as long as it is not happening to me or around me then why would I care but the whole point of this digital world is to connect us all together and if we’re connected then it should be for better or for worse I guess. I know it’s not a marriage kind of thing but you really do create really strong connections with people all over the world when you let yourself be open to it. Being a twitter person myself, I really connect to what Dr.Maha Bali is saying about having strong reactions to hashtags happening far away from her. I actually friends from different parts of the worlds because of this platform. This has actually helped me a lot in my life because I was able to see other point of views and even read opinions that are so different than mine but still having an open discussion about it.

The question, like Dr.Maha said, is can the digital help in promoting empathetic and social justice-oriented critical citizenship, rather than digital citizenship in general? If you want to know my opinion then I would definitely say yes. Of course this does not mean that it will solve everything cause the digital world itself is not one without problems or inequalities. Even in the digital world not everyone is heard, some voices have more than a million followers and others have barely a hundred and some have been muted by authority and put away in cages for typing a few words. However, I still think that the digital world can help us in lots of ways. I think I can say that I am a digital citizen and I am proud. One of the difference between my generation and my parent’s generation is that I get my news updates online and from actual people on twitter and they get it from Amr Adeeb, but you can see how happy I am when I actually tell them a piece of information that is not even mentioned in “traditional” media. This is when I feel like citizen journalism and social media are indeed really helpful in a country such as ours. Finally, I do see that social media promotes empathy, something like the video of the young Quaden Bayles who went viral this week really showed how people can have empathy for one another and social media was the tool that helped him get in touch with a lot of people.

3. Digital Literacy Campus Conversation

Aside from the breakfast that I enjoyed at the back of the room, as I was eating my cookies from cilantro and sipping on some coffee, Dr.Maha was having a conversation with us in the room about words such as skills, literacy and fluency. I also enjoyed the game of skill or literacy that we all played together by raising a blue paper if we felt like the sentence on the board was considered a literacy and a white paper if was a skill. I got them all right but who’s counting right? When we were divided into smaller groups to talk about the topics presented like digital citizenship or literacy we got to talk to different kinds of people, students like myself, grad students, staff and professors, so it was interesting to have an open discussion and listening to the different interpretations or point of views. I think I now understand the two concepts very clearly.