I am hoping to foreground a little bit of Microsoft Teams and a little bit of Discord. I qualify the scale of my presentation of these two platforms this way because I am not masterful in either of these platforms and have only developed a level of digital literacy for them up to the standards that my employers and Professor Muhlbauer have asked of me. I am hoping to foreground these two platforms because I do not possess digital literacy in any other platform, website, or digital tool; these two platforms also cover real-life experiences that will require 1,500 words to express.
I will discuss three digital literacy skills and practices in regard to Microsoft Teams and Discord: making judgments about the relevance of a web source based on the content presented, writing precise and concise messages, and adding reactions to posts and messages.
Both Microsoft Teams and Discord require one to write precise and concise messages because both platforms have character limits and because this practice transmits urgent information efficiently. Both Microsoft Teams and Discord require one to add reactions to others’ posts and messages to nonverbally communicate disapproval or understanding — it is much more practical and less wasteful to insert a reaction to a message rather than write and send a message. In both internships, judgments of the relevance of a web source proved crucial to saving other interns’ time since these judgments filtered false or unuseful information.
I remember I couldn’t send files to my boss or my co-workers through Microsoft Teams, so discovering that Microsoft Teams does not allow its users to send files through the messaging system classifies as a conflict in my development of digital literacy with Microsoft Teams because I learned about this platform’s limitations through inquiry and investigation with my co-workers.
I will not experiment with different multimedia formats because not enough evidence for the events in this digital literacy narrative exists.
Microsoft Teams and Discord operate on the internet, so they both allow for communication without in-person contact, which epitomizes how communication technology has connected humans across the planet Earth during the COVID-19 pandemic.