monica aresta's List: digitalId

• We’re nodes in a network. We all have strengths and skills, but they go to waste if we don’t know how to connect them with and through the right people
• Until there’s a Twitter application that will map my entire network for me in a meaningful way, I feel limited in my ability to grow the network any larger
• So the conclusion here (or conversation starter, I should say) is that our online reputation management shouldn’t be limited to what we don’t want people to see or say about us. Let the understanding that you’re in public guide your judgment about what to post online. Instead, what if we think about our online reputations as the bridges that serve to enhance the network itself?

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• If the social Web is destined to have a growing influence on teaching and  learning (and research) in HE then we have to understand what impact that has in  terms of identity management.

  • good point
• The important point is that learners (and staff) will come into institutions  with an existing identity, they will increasingly expect to use that identity  while they are there (particularly in their use of services 'outside' the  institution) and that they will continue using it after they have left.  As  a community, we therefore have to understand what impact that has on our  provision of services and the way we support learning and research.  It's a  shame that the report seems to have missed this point.

• What it means to be public or private is quickly changing before our eyes and we lack the language, social norms, and structures to handle it.
• Slowly, a third group of educators is emerging - those who believe that it is essential to understand and embrace the new social technologies so as to guide youth through the murky waters that they present.
• Educators have a very powerful role to play in helping smooth the cultural transition that is taking place
• Using text, images, video, audio, links, quizzes, and surveys, teens generate a profile that expresses how they see themselves
• a public commenting feature
• These three features - profiles, Friends lists, and comments - comprise the primary structure of all social network sites, although individual sites provide additional features for further engagement.
• In some senses, mediated publics are similar to the unmediated publics with which most people are familiar - parks, malls, parking lots, cafes, etc.
• Public spaces have many purposes in social life - they allow people to make sense of the social norms that regulate society, they let people learn to express themselves and learn from the reactions of others, and they let people make certain acts or expressions ‘real’ by having witnesses acknowledge them (Arendt 1998). Social network sites are yet another form of public space. Yet, while mediated and unmediated publics play similar roles in people’s lives, the mediated publics have four properties that are quite unique to them.
• At a first pass, it’s challenging to interpret context in a mediated space.
• The lack of context is precisely why the imagined audience of Friends is key
• Just like journalists, participants in social network sites imagine their audience and speak according to the norms they perceive to be generally accepted. The difference is that journalists are trying to carefully craft a message to energise a targeted audience, while teenagers are just shooting the breeze, showing off, and just plain hanging out amongst the people they call friends. The ephemeral speech that would be acceptable in any unmediated public with a homogenous audience is not nearly so well-received in a mediated public with variable audiences.
• The Internet lacks walls. Conversations spread and contexts collapse.
• This dilemma introduces another complication of how public life has changed. Just because it’s possible to get access to information, is it always OK to do so
• When asked, all youth know that anyone could access their profiles online. Yet, the most common response I receive is “…but why would they?
• While most of this is taking place through text right now, video is increasing daily. Video is not currently searchable, but technology will advance, making it possible to determine who was in what footage. These systems will also go mobile the moment someone figures out how to break through the mobile carrier roadblock. When things go mobile, location based information will add a new dimension to the hyperpublic infrastructure.
• Although most adults wish that formal education was the number one priority of youth, this is rarely the case. Most youth are far more concerned with connecting with their friends.
• 2) Keep your profile public and responsible, but not lam
• Mediated publics are here to stay; yet they are complicating many aspects of daily life. The role of an educator is not to condemn or dismiss youth practices, but to help youth understand how their practices fit into a broader societal context. These are exciting times; embracing societal change and influencing the norms can only help everyone involved.

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• "Total recall" renders context, time, and distance irrelevant. Something that happened 40 years ago—whether youthful o
• context
• larly indiscretion—still matters and can come back to harm us as if it had happened yesterday.

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• Simply: social and technological networks subvert the classroom-based role of the teacher.
• Networks thin classroom walls. Experts are no longer “out there” or “over there”. Skype brings anyone, from anywhere, into a classroom. Students are not confined to interacting with only the ideas of a researcher or theorist. Instead, a student can interact directly with researchers through Twitter, blogs, Facebook, and listservs. The largely unitary voice of the traditional teacher is fragmented by the limitless conversation opportunities available in networks. When learners have control of the tools of conversation, they also control the conversations in which they choose to engage.
• Based on the courses I’ve taught with Stephen Downes over the last few years – CCK08 & CCK09 – I’ve come to view teaching as a critical and needed activity in the chaotic and ambiguous information climate created by networks. In the future, however, the role of the teacher, the educator, will be dramatically different from the current norm. Views of teaching, of learner roles, of literacies, of expertise, of control, and of pedagogy
• iven that coherence and lucidity are key to understanding our world, how do educators teach in networks? For educators, control is being replaced with influence. Instead of c
• ontrolling a classroom, a teacher now influences or shapes a network.
• 1. Amplifying
   2. Curating
   3. Wayfinding and socially-driven sensemaking
   4. Aggregating
   5. Filtering
   6. Modelling
   7. Persistent presence
• Thoughts, ideas, or messages that the teacher amplifies will generally have a greater probability of being seen by course participants
• As a learner grows (and prunes) her personal networks, she also develops an effective means to filter abundance.
• In order for these networks to work effectively, learners must be conscious of the need for diversity and should include nodes that offer critical or antagonistic perspectives on all topic areas.
• Filtering resources is an important educator role, but as noted already, effective filtering can be done through a combination of wayfinding, social sensemaking, and aggregation
• cs. Learning is an eliminative process.
• What cannot be communicated and understood by lecture and learning activities alone can be addressed through modelling by the teacher.
• Without an online identity, you can’t connect with others – to know and be known.
• Persistent presence in the learning network is needed for the teacher to amplify, curate, aggregate, and filter content and to model critical thinking and cognitive attributes that reflect the needs of a discipline.
• (the methods of learning in networks are not new, however. People have always learned in social networks).

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• It is worth noting that theorists of both professional and social networks speak of one’s interactions within the community as a process of building, or creating, one’s own identity.
  Wenger, for example, writes, “Having a sense of identity is a crucial aspect of learning in organizations. Consider the annual computer drop at a semiconductor company that designs both analog and digital circuits. The computer drop became a ritual by which the analog community asserted its identity. Once a year, their hero would climb the highest building on the company's campus and drop a computer, to the great satisfaction of his peers in the analog gang. The corporate world is full of these displays of identity, which manifest themselves in the jargon people use, the clothes they wear, and the remarks they make.” (Wenger, 1998)
  
  And meanwhile, danah boyd, studying the social community, writes, “The dynamics of identity production play out visibly on MySpace. Profiles are digital bodies, public displays of identity where people can explore impression management. Because the digital world requires people to write themselves into being, profiles provide an opportunity to craft the intended expression through language, imagery and media. Explicit reaction to their online presence offers valuable feedback. The goal is to look cool and receive peer validation. Of course, because imagery can be staged, it is often difficult to tell if photos are a representation of behaviors or a re-presentation of them.” (boyd, 2006)
  
  In both of these we are seeing aspects of the same phenomenon. To learn is not to acquire or to accumulate, but rather, to develop or to grow. The process of learning is a process of becoming, a process of developing one’s own self.
  
  Accordingly, what we know of the communities of the future where learning will actually occur is that they will be communities in which learners can immerse themselves and grow into something new. Previous experience suggests that these will be places where they can create and where they can project – not “serious games” but “modding communities”, not “reading groups” but “fan fiction”, not “educational simulations” but “LAN parties”.
  

• But what if the damaged reputation is self-inflicted?