Public Learning & Identity

I want to start by thanking @rhetorjjb for her twitter post that kicked off the need to do this reflecting.

@rhetorjjb and I have decided we want to explore this topic a bit more. Based on the topic itself, we decided we would do our thinking and researching and reading publically. I hope we weave our way through some reflecting and maybe some research and reading.
I have been “requiring” that my students “publish” their work on the internet for many years. By “required, “ I mean the default set up of the course is public publishing; however, the students had the option of not doing it and/or setting up password protection. By “publish” I mean I have required as little as only the final major projects published; or, increasingly, I have required students publish all their work (usually in a blog). When using a blog, or wiki or…, to publish all their work, the student’s work results in a eportfolio type documents for the class.
Why?
I’ve had my students do this for a variety of reasons. Since I have spent the past nine years teaching at a community college, I teach a lot of writing classes. For many of those students, having the concept of a “real audience” to write to helped them. I’ve increasingly had students produce multimodal compositions so I needed them to have a place to submit that work digitally. I’ve also, more or less, bought into the “we need to teach 21st century literacies” and believe that having students understand how blogs and wikis work as well as how to make an active hyperlink helps facilitate learning those various literacies. 

The vast majority of my classes were online classes as well. I don’t like the idea of having students learn technologies they are less than likely to use once they graduate (aka, an LMS) so I like having them learn to navigate a blog or wiki space (where I build my courses) and then produce their own. Finally, I do believe that learning is better facilitated through social interaction; therefore, publishing in blogs and wikis provide the opportunity for reader responses and feedback.
Now, the past decade or so of having students do this has only been with undergraduate students. And whereas I’ve always been happy to let them use a pseudonym and/or password protect their work; I confess, I have not be very diligent about dialoguing with them about constructing online identities.
This semester at least one of the other graduate faculty and I at ODU are having our graduate students blog about their readings. Besides all of the reasons above, I also wanted to help motivate students to take some form of notes on each reading. This is so that students would better engage the reading the first time through (write to learn activities) and have some form of notes to return to in the future to use in a paper, for comps, etc. (producing an archive/bibliography of notes). With my class, I said the notes could be casual in nature; and, from what I understand, the other class has a little bit more of a formal assignment (but it sounds like some of the reasoning is the same).
Concerns
One of the concerns of having students produce and publish their work online is related to legal privacy issues like FERPA. I have actually spent some time thinking exploring FERPA. Since I was increasingly doing professional development workshops suggesting that faculty have their students produce work within these spaces, I need to be able to talk about the legal ramifications. Over time I have adapted and adopted language for a policy statement in my syllabus (see here). In short, I have never had a student refuse to participate using one of these technologies; however, I do have a growing number use pseudonyms and/or password protection options.
As I’ve already hinted at, I admit that I probably need to spend more time having students critically think about their online identities and how work in my courses helps construct a portion of their identities. In one of my classes I have started to incorporate an assignment like that; however, it currently comes at the end of the semester (after I’ve had the students making accounts in a variety of web-based applications). Ethically, I should be engaging the students in this topic right at the beginning of the course.
And now I also have to confess it is not until a graduate student, not even in my own class, who comments on the concern of constructing a public professional identity that I am motivated to spend more time thinking about and working on the issue. In other words, shame on me for not being more concerned about my undergraduate students’ identities.
What I see needing to occur culturally
Two years ago at the annual EDUCAUSE conference in Denver, I was in a Twitter conversation talking about the need to “forgive” young persons, and in this case, professionals, in an increasingly public culture. In other words, when what happens in Vegas stays on Twitter, Fb, YouTube, Flickr, etc., we have to acknowledge that most of us were not “perfect” and made mistakes growing up (both as minors as well as young professionals). The trouble is that historically most of those mistakes were not achievable and were forgotten as they became blurry parts of our fading memories. Now, we can be instantly reminded of Undergraduate Joey’s drinking binge any time we want to watch it on YouTube or see the picture in Fb.

Similarly, I was at a conference last year and was listening to some graduate students. I leaned over to a good friend, colleague, and fellow ASU Alumni (aka, we were grad students together) and chuckled about how those new to the profession/discipline have to work their way through various pieces of scholarship and theories; and then, more than likely, will move on or “grow out of” those theories. The “proof” of that graduate students’ processing of that theory in a conference paper is only archived through the conference program. If I’m asking my students to reflect online in blogs or other types of reading journals, the archive of their stumbling through new scholarship and theory is more permanent.
As a community college faculty member I have not had to worry about making my “thinking” public; my tenure was not dependent on more traditional publications in peer reviewed journals. However, our graduate (and undergraduate) students are (re)constructing their professional identities. I understand the need to present a polished, coherent, and positive identity; however, there is something about making process public, getting feedback, and being “real.”

October 11 2011 | Posted in