I have basically had a computer since the '80s when I bought a Commodore 64 and took my first programming course to learn BASIC. Discovered that I learned best by making huge mistakes - things like formating over the floppy disks that held the operating system, or erasing a system file. The world did not end and the PC did not explode. Okay, there was that one time when I re-installed over part of a hard drive that I wanted to keep, yet I survived. Eventually I evolved into that person that everyone asked for help when they couldn't make the program they were using work or print out that document.

When I, much later, decided to become a teacher, computers seemed like a natural choice. So I taught students and adults things like computer basics, web development and media production. That eventually led to the job I have today as an educational technologist at Karolinska. Though I must admit that it was KI's involvment with MOOCs that sparked my interest. A MOOC is a massively open online course. I love the idea of education being open to anyone who wants to learn and believe that digital tools are slowly but surely removing barriers that keep so many people from accessing an education.

A little digital history

I connected with the world through music and Internet forums and made worldwide friends through ICQ and IRC while being an online DJ for Seismic radio. We used Real Producer to broadcast to our audience while chatting about the music we played. ICQ eventually led to MSN messenger, which was then abandoned for Facebook. I even have long-time accounts on Google and Twitter, but have not really used them in a regular way, other than for school-related projects.

My digital world today

Doug Belshaw's eight elements of digital literacies is an interesting way to make sense of something that is really very messy, since as he mentioned, the digital world is very broad and consists of far too many pieces to be able to pigeonhole into one meaning. 

While I consider myself to obtained the skill and mindsets for many of the digital listeracies I also notice that I am continually striving to find some sort of balance.My ultimate goal is to maintain some control over that identity that is out there and that one that is me.