James Clay, Kev Hickey, Shri Footring and Lisa Valentine discuss Twitter, digital literacy, digital identity and other stuff too.
This is the eighteenth e-Learning Stuff Podcast, Digital Literates.
Download the podcast in mp3 format: Digital Literates
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James is joined by Kev Hickey and Shri Footring. Lisa Valentine joins us later in the conversation.
Shownotes
- Digital Literacy Debate – The purpose of the debate is to try and move forward on issues surrounding Digital Literacy. The focus of the debate will be the UK education sector, but international attendees and contributors are more than welcome. Recently, Digital Literacy has gained a lot of traction within academic and educational technology discussion within the UK, and is generally thought of as A Good Thing. However, some important questions have yet to be addressed.
- James, Shri, Kev and Lisa all use Twitter, but some of us prefer Jaiku.
- So what is a hashtag?
- Pat Parslow’s comment on the term digital native.
- Marc Prensky’s new paper on digital wisdom.
- Dave White’s blog a post about residents or visitors to the online world.
- The e-Learning Stuff podcast on the whole digital native, immigrant, visitor, resident, naturalised debate.
Photo source.
That ended a bit suddenly 🙂
Interesting discussion, and you managed to lure me into listening to a podcast (amazing what mentioning my name can do!) – generally I find the time taken to listen could be better used engaging in text based communication.
But having said that, I think a number of very interesting points are raised here – anonymity is a particularly interesting one. Are we not anonymous if a persona we project has to remain consistent in order for it to build a trust network, or does its separation from other aspects of our ‘self’ leave it as an anonymous but (semi-)complete whole in its own right?
I have my online “me” used for nearly all purposes – PatParslow – which I use professionally (if you can call it that!) and for more social things. I actually make an effort not to censor myself most of the time (but then I excuse that by offering my online persona as an example of how you may *not* want to manage you identity). On the other hand, I have completely different personae for playing some games, and yet another for discussing a particular hobby. One of my ‘gaming’ personas is involved in different games, but she has quite different personalities in them.
I am conscious that I will behave differently when engaging in different roles in ‘real’ life too. I am no less genuinely me when playing with my 18month old Godson than when in lecturing mode, or mentoring mode, or socialising at a conference, discussing how to implement a program or railing against the various injustices in the world. I behave quite differently in each of these circumstances though, and it seems appropriate to me to reflect these in online settings. The ability to take on an avatar, or a different name, just facilitates the change of role, and I think it allows others to recognise the differences more readily.
I was also interested in the piece about feeling the need for control in synchronous online sessions. I would agree that when facilitating a session, there seems to be something ‘missing’ in terms of being able to be aware how people are reacting to the flow. I actually find that harder in a setting like Second Life than in a straight text chat, but in both cases it is harder than in a semi-synchronous setting such as on a forum. The hardest teaching I have done has been with technically literate teachers learning about how to use Second Life with me, somewhat laughably in my view, trying to teach them. Give me a bunch of teenagers or rising fives anyday, in comparison to that experience!