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Category Archives: Digital Identities
Waving Around Identities
Invites to Google wave seem to be fast rippling out so time for some first thoughts. Like most people I guess, my first reaction was what is it and what can it do?
The first problem is trying to find someone to play with. Wave is decidedly a collaborative environment and it is not easy to find open waves to join. I found an educators directory and added my name along with the 300 or so others there. But that didn’t seem particularly useful – why create a list of people just because they are in education and in possession of a precious wave invite.
So I reverted to some old technology and twittered out. Pat Parslow invited me to join a ‘sandbox wave’ he had set up for people to introduce themselves and play. And play we did – to such a degree that it was decided to copy what was useful and sensible to yet another introductions wave.
More importantly, the next day Shirley Williams suggested we try out a serious project. Given that Pat and Shirley are working on the This Is Me project and I am working on the Rhizome project , both funded by Eduserve and both focusing on Digital Identities, we chose that as a subject. Pat posted a short text to launch the Wave, and then we all waded in commenting and annotating the text. And much to my surprise it seems to work. It is the first truly usable collective authoring tool that I have used. A bit like Google docs on steroids. And it is particularly interesting to see how we are fast evolving social conventions for using this new tool
Don’t get me wrong, Google Wave is by no means finished. The interfaces can be clunky, it is not always easy to find where text has been added or edited or commented on, the replay doesn’t work – at least on my computer, and the people aspect of social networking seems a little rudimentary.
Now onto the next experiment, suggested by Pat and Shirley – to create a Workbook to help educators, mentors and guidance staff (e.g. careers guidance and the like) learn about their Digital Identity (process…) and how to enhance it, tame it, and use it.”
The idea is to write the workbook together in one week and to publish it under a Creative Commons BY SA license on www.lulu.com with co-authorship to anyone who contributes. Shout (or should I say wave) if you are interested.
New media paradox: global use but cultural embeddedness
More on the issue of cultures. I have had an interesting exchange of emails with Eileen Luebcke from the University of Bremen. Eileen talks of the paradox of New Media in terms of “the promise of worldwide global use but the cultural embeddedness of the technology.”
She is interested in the idea of comparing e-learning environments with regard to hidden cultural differences. In terms of evidence for such cultural differences she suggests:
- “There are cultures that heavily depend on oral traditions for learning (the whole Orient, first nation people all over the world). It is still unclear how to deal with this difference, but it seems that the Western idea of libraries are not efficient for this. There is an article from South Africa describing that a certain disadvantage for African people is manifested even in the digital divide due to a focus on written information within library and e-learning systems. It is still unclear how to adapt Western e-learning concepts to this.
- This adds to differences in hierarchy and differences in the concept of teachers. Discourse approaches like in Western class rooms often fail because expectations towards the role of teachers are different. There is also comparative research investigating the different online behaviour of Norwegian, American, and Korean students. Norwegian students tend to be more discourse oriented than American students. If discourse is a main educative goal I would assume that this is mirrored in the e-learning environments used or in how e-learning environments are used.
- An additional interesting aspect is the design. There are some studies which investigate the design of websites. Especially interesting is a study of the use of American and Chinese users of websites constructed by native and non-native programmers. It turned out that even with the same content Americans find the information faster on websites with American origin and vice versa. “
Such cultural factors may interact with pedagogic approaches to learning using technology. In an article in First Monday Lisa Lane suggests that different Content Management Systems “may not only influence, but control instructional approaches. She says that Blackboard “forces the instructor to think in terms of content types instead, breaking the natural structure of the semester, or of a list of topics.” Lane compares the design of Moodle to Blackboard, proposing that the ‘opt in’ structure of the Moodle CMS allows the instructor to make “choices about context on a macro level, and choices about features and tools on a micro level. This makes it possible to explore pedagogical options more freely.”
I will meet Eileen Leubcke next week to discuss designing a research project around these issues. If you are interested and have ideas around this, please get in touch.
Digital Identities and Social Relations
Just spent half an hour checking around blogs and twitter to see what is new on a Monday morning. And I was interested to see the latest survey from Pew Internet (just an aside – why cannot we organise as thorough a survey in Europe as Pew does for the US?).
The latest Pew Internet & American Life Project survey asked respondents to assess predictions about technology and its roles in the year 2020 and they provide the following summary of the (very substantial) report:
- The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.
- The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.
- Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.
- Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing arms race, with the crackers who will find ways to copy and share content without payment.
- The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations.
- Next-generation engineering of the network to improve the current internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch.”
I will be coming back to many of these issues in the next few posts. But I am particularly interested in the issue of the division between personal and work time and between physical and virtual reality – although I am not sure about some of the terminology. two weeks ago we ran a workshop on Digital identities at the European Conference on Educational Research in Vienna as part of the Eduserve Rhizome project on Digital Identities. We are working on a short video on the workshop which should come out later this week. Most of the issues arising from the workshop were as we would have expected and in line with similar workshops we have organised in the UK. But what was surprising were some of the discussions in the workshop especially around the issues of privacy, personal spaces and work . personal life issues. Why surprising? Mainly because there was such a divergence of feelings around these issues. there were some 18 participants in the workshop from 15 different countries. And it appears that attitudes towards privacy and work / personal life divisions are heavily influenced by culture. This finding requires far more investigation than we were able to undertake in a short workshop. But it does appear that in different countries there are very different attitudes towards for instance what data should be private and the degree ot which entries on a social networking sites should be viewed as part of professional activities.
One participant provided an example of where a teacher had expressed personal opinions on a social networking site which were seen as racist by parents of some of the students and resulted – if my memory is right – in them being dismissed. Some felt this was reasonable, given that such an opinions would effect their ability as a teacher. Others felt that however objectionable such opinions this infringed on rights of personal free speech in a non work related forum.
Steven Warburton summaries the dissussion on the Rhizome project blog:
The “richness in nationalities immediately foregrounded what is an often overlooked dimension in discussions around digital identity – namely the impact of cultural difference. Different cultures both create and consume their [digital] identities in different ways. This was most keenly reflected in the shared conversations around where we perceive the boundary between our public and private lives. The mass use of social services such as Facebook can appear to have a homogenising effect, erasing cultural distinctions through normalised ’social-networking’ practices.”
I have not read the full Pew report. But issues like this will not go away and I am intrigued to find out in which ways the experts Pew interviewed see the mixed impact on basic social relations