Discussion with students and staff in the College of Medicine, NUI Galway, 4th June 2013. As an advocate of connected learning and open education, I was invited to speak with medical students and staff about issues surrounding digital identity and online presence as students, educators, and professionals. These slides were used simply as a prompt for our discussion -- many thanks to all for a stimulating session!
3. “I don‟t think
education is about
centralized instruction
anymore; rather,
it is the process [of]
establishing oneself
as a node in a broad
network of distributed
creativity.”
– Joichi Ito (2011)
Image: CC BY-NC-
10. ...our reality is both technological and
organic, both digital and physical, all at once.
We are not crossing in and out of separate
digital and physical realities, a la The Matrix,
but instead live in one reality, one that is
augmented by atoms and bits.
Nathan Jurgenson (2011)
@nathanjurgenson
Digital Dualism versus Augmented Reality
11. It is wrong to say “IRL” to mean offline:
Facebook is real life.
Nathan Jurgenson (2012)
The IRL Fetish
16. “If institutions of learning are going to help
learners with the real challenges they face...
[they] will have to shift their focus from
imparting curriculum to supporting the
negotiation of productive identities
through landscapes of practices.”
CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 choconancy1
Etienne Wenger
SRHE Conference 2010 Knowledgeability in Landscapes of Practice
in deFreitas & Jameson, Eds. (2012) The e-Learning Reader
20. “Recently our class has begun to use
more social networking sites like
Facebook and tools like DropBox to
share notes and keep up to date with
lectures. I found this to be a great
benefit in studying and managing my
work.”
Social media...
#studentvoice
21. “Strange putting a face to the voice of
my first year maths lecturer!
Khan Academy is possibly one of the
most useful sources for students
studying maths. The idea is simple, If
you don't understand the first time you
watch it... watch it again.”
Khan Academy...
#studentvoice
30. semi-open
real name
any photo
1 identity:
social
Managing Identity Online
open
any name
photo/avatar
unlimited IDs:
interest-driven
open
real name
ID photo
1 identity:
professional
closed
real name
no photo
1 identity:
student/lecturer
32. Learners need to practice and experiment with
different ways of enacting their identities, and
adopt subject positions through different social
technologies and media.
These opportunities can only be supported by
academic staff who are themselves engaged in
digital practices and questioning their own
relationship with knowledge.
- Keri Facer & Neil Selwyn (2010)
Rethinking Learning for a Digital Age
33. “The onus is on us as scholars
to understand the possibilities
that the intersection of digital,
network and open approaches
allow...
The adoption of the functions of
engagement, experimentation,
reflection and sharing will
generate the resilient
scholarship of the next
generation.”
- Martin Weller (2012)
35. Exploring digital identity with our students (2012) by Catherine Cronin
(@catherinecronin)
Social network sites as networked publics (2010) by danah boyd (@zephoria)
Digital identities: Six key selves of networked publics (2012) by Bonnie Stewart
(@bonstewart)
Who are we now that we‟re online? Connected learners, connected educators
(2013) by Bonnie Stewart (@bonstewart)
Digital dualism and the fallacy of web objectivity (2012) by Nathan Jurgenson
(@nathanjurgenson)
You are not your name and photo: A call to reimagine identity (2011), Wired
article by Tim Carmody (@tcarmody)
The case for anonymity online (2010) TED Talk by Christopher “moot” Poole
(@moot)
We, our digital selves, and us – YouTube video (2012) by Alan Levine
(@cogdog)
Social Media Literacies syllabus (2012) by Howard Rheingold (@hrheingold)
Digital Identity resources
36. • eLearning Toolkit wiki -- information on OERs, finding
images, copyright & Creative Commons, creating videos
& screencasts, and more
• Social bookmarking & curation tools:
o Diigo
o Delicious
o Scoop.it
• Twitter clients
o HootSuite
o TweetDeck
Tools & resources discussed during the workshop:
Notas del editor
what is it? relationship between DI & IRL Privacy & Anonymity practicesDI = the persona we present across all digital communities It is often said that we leave our "digital footprint" behind as we share and interact online.
Not connected/limited by geography, space, time... but connected by our own ideas, passion, commitment via social media.
Elements of our DI include information that we create ourselves -- as well as information about us which is posted by others.
Who are you? And how to you construct YOU online?
OFFLINE = organic, physical, laws of physicsONLINE = technological, digital, laws of codingDifferent experiences of time/space, visibility & privacy
OFFLINE = organic, physical, laws of physicsONLINE = technological, digital, laws of codingDifferent experiences of time/space, visibility & privacy
What *is* privacy?Is it closing the door? Is it closing the door to whom we wish, when we wish?The nature of digital artefacts is that it is very, very difficult to ensure the privacy of ANYthing online!Mark Zuckerberg, asserts that sharing or "public" is the new social norm. Jeff Jarvis, author of Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live, acknowledges that fear accompanies the adoption of any new technology and notes that "we will make a lot of mistakes as we develop social norms around how to treat information online". Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together, maintains that democracy requires that we retain a zone of privacy around the individual.danahboyd writes about being aware of an "invisible audience" -- defines 4 key characterisics of information (about us) which exist online. Persistent: recorded & archivedReplicable: can be duplicatedScalable: potential visibility is greatSearchable: accessible through searchPrivacy on Twitter – it doesn’t existPrivacy on Google+ ... set up circles... But they are leaky! Private posts can be shared Circles can be invited others (and others can do this!)
It’s not the audience! It’s your context within the audience. American internet entrepreneur from NYC, noted for founding the websites 4chan and Canvas. He originally started 4chan anonymously, under the pseudonym moot.
Knowledge NOT= CurriculumKnowledge = “a living landscape of communities of practice that contribute in various ways” to our learning and to our identitiesSo… HOW do we do this?!
This is not a MOOC.This is not an open programme.This is a typical BSc programme, UG, mostly school leavers
Google+ was useful for more in-depth reflections, e.g....
And... a reflection on Khan Academy.
We agreed to use Twitter as a tool throughout the course… have used G+ in the past, but there were some issues with that.Use a class Twitter account and hashtag. Invokes digital identity immediately!Must discuss and explore first... privacy, identity in online spaces, etc. Who am I on Google? Who am I here? In this class? Who is the audience?
Identity is prismatic... in FB, identity is a mirror. Context collapses.Consolidating identity is actually distorting our identity.
3 themes...Fascinating, is that these are very personal and individual considerations, that we negotiate daily -- as well as exploring them with our students. This puts this kind of teaching in a different realm to teaching effective research skills, for example.