Misdirection, redirection, moving on

Taking time to reflect is sometimes the hardest part of life, although it shouldn't be. Every time a fresh cohort of H8** start twittering, I am reminded how much I got into using my blog as a way to reflect and steer my mind. I am also reminded of how I let life and work get in the way! So, no more feeling sorry for myself, its time to start blogging again. I am now a freelance trainer and consultant and every week I am seeing new things and thinking about stuff. I definitely have lots to share.
Of course, one of the things I need to decide, is whether to set up a new blog, or to keep using this one? By using this one (of which I like my title), I can continue my journey and be more broad in my subjects. But should I have a separate one which focuses more on safeguarding? 
I am about to go on holiday, so I will ponder this over the next two weeks, but do let me know your thoughts. Do I branch out on separate lines, or return to my Antics here. 
And if you have just started H8** - good luck! Soak it up. Get involved. Its one of the best things I have ever done.

The project approach: networked practice and learning from peers

Open and networked practice

The final project artefact is intended to be an open educational resource, so developing the project in an open environment was a meaningful way to explore and role model online participation. Online networks and open practices are an integral part of my personal (as a student) and professional (as a practitioner) world. Four main platforms were used to inform and develop the project: the Open University, Twitter, a personal blog and open journals. As the project was situated in my professional context, using established networks outside of the Open University was important. Other practitioners and Scouting volunteers presented different viewpoints, and diversity of opinion was helpful in critically reviewing the project development.

This personal blog was used as the central point with which to share the development of the project. I hope the blog has afforded participation in digital ‘creation’, alongside the development my digital identity. It does have a limited audience, but sharing posts through Twitter has increased this and also helped to extend the discussions (thanks all). New and existing contacts have aided reflection and signposted to further research and resources. Twitter was also beneficial when looking at the macro-environmental factors. Using the hashtag facility as a search tool highlighted current debates, projects and interested people. Furthermore, it afforded research on the move as posts could be read or bookmarked for future review from a mobile device. The main impact in being more open was that practitioners outside of the Open University engaged in the debates. This gave assurance, credibility and confidence in the project’s relevance for the wider world. 

Creating posters and peer review

The creation of a conference poster presented a chance to explore new, online, multimedia tools and consider alternative forms of digital creativity.

Multimedia methods

In face-to-face practice a variety of methods and media are used to deliver educational material and I wanted to mirror this within the project. I wanted to tell a story, but to keep the messages simple and reflective of core values, in order to engage and motivate the intended audience. Mayer’s (2005) cognitive theory of multi-media learning however, reminds us that we have separate, limited, channels for processing auditory and visual information and we need to get the mix of media right in order to actively process information and create coherent mental representations. 

As Scouting is about ‘learning by doing’, I adopted this approach. By experimenting with different media formats and presenting them early for review, I was able to determine the most appropriate approach. Animations provoked more emotional responses and recognition of their story-telling potential. The final decision to use a slideshow based animation was a result of asking Scouting volunteers to feedback on two different kinds of animation, in order to get a different perspective. They viewed the slideshow animations as more interactive and engaging, with greater potential for re-purposing.

The role of feedback

The process of engaging in feedback, on our own as well as others work, aided poster development. Feedback developed from simple comments to more detailed and constructive guidance as we engaged with other student’s material and reflected back on our own. A good example of this is how later feedback often asked about the theme and the artefact, as more students realised this was not explicit within their own posters. The first poster version created provoked attention-grabbing, motivational responses and recognised the impact of the visuals and logical approach it afforded. However feedback also helped develop the poster so that it became more explicit in the concepts it was exploring and included clearer links to the project questions and outcomes. Once again, feedback from outside of the Open University was also sought, to ensure that the approach and messages maintained a wider relevance, but also kept the wider network updated with the project progress. The process of feedback also helped in determining potential accessible alternatives. Following feedback and discussion with fellow students in OULive, an audio text version was created, which responded to comments and a simple slideshow version, with embedded alternative text for screen readers, for those who needed time to navigate the slides or visual descriptions of the content. The process of giving and receiving feedback has therefore been invaluable in critically evaluating the development of project resources.

So thanks all for being part of the project too!

In the run up to the conference...

The Open University conference is here and yesterday the first students presented their projects. It was an amazing array of different projects, topics and professions. That's the great thing about the Open University, fellow students are so diverse, so you get a richness of learning about different contexts and through different eyes. Although the conference was for Open University students and alumni, you can see some of the content here in Cloudworks.

I feel like I cheated a bit, but by exploring a topic that I am already passionate about and that I work on in 'real-life' (let's face it, I am a boundary defying practitioner), I have managed to create something that may be useful in the future. 

I am going to share my last assignment with you through the next few bog posts, so you can understand a little more about the 'stuff' that I have been thinking about. I will also post a recorded version of my presentation, once the 'real' one is done!

Conference Abstract

Volunteers in Scouting do amazing things with young people every day, and whether they are climbing a mountain or using social media they should use the values and methods of scouting to guide them. 

For The Scout Association, education is about helping young people build confidence and life-long skills. This participatory approach to education means the ‘digital-inclusion’ of adult volunteers is less about accessibility of content and more about participation in online practices and engaging with young people in the online world. Consequently, the ‘Being Prepared’ project wanted to explore whether the adoption of a ‘values-based approach’ to digital inclusion, could offer a simple, but effective framework to help engage volunteers in discussions about digital participation. 

Digital inclusion is a multi-faceted concept, and the barriers to inclusion are embedded in social, cultural, economic and technological contexts. Existing research and advice often centres on the practicalities of ‘how to’ go online. While this is important, addressing the social and psychological barriers that adults may have to overcome are essential and less commonplace conversations. Therefore digital inclusion should also examine the ‘why’ go online and the ‘how to be’ online.

The ‘why’ go online looks at how motivation and attitudes towards technology use will affect the choices made. Individuals may think the technical aspects too challenging or feel participation is irrelevant. For this reason discussions about digital inclusion should consider the ‘meaningfulness’ of digital participation in people’s lives. Digital identity, the ‘how to be’ online, is about the presentation of self to others online, and the perception of self, developed through online interactions. From a practitioner perspective, digital identity is at the forefront of discussions about online safety, as individuals learn to navigate the online world. Exploring identity highlights the risks, fears and feelings connected to the sense of self and exposes individual vulnerabilities in an unknown environment. Digital inclusion needs to help individuals to take responsibility and make informed choices about their own digital identity, so they can take advantage of the opportunities as well as understanding the risks afforded by digital participation.

This presentation tells the story of the ‘Being Prepared’ project. In order to understand the context, it introduces Scouting and outlines the debates about digital inclusion and digital identity in more detail. The project takes a socio-cultural view of inclusion and identity, and proposes that digital inclusion, like education and development is constructed and defined through our interactions with others and the world around us. Therefore the existing motivations and skills of Scouting volunteers, established upon shared values, can encourage meaningful and truthful digital participation, within a framework already observed. 

The presentation will conclude by presenting the project artefact; an open educational resource, which takes the form of a website. The purpose of the artefact is not to provide volunteers with the answers, but to engage them in the conversation, and to help them to take responsibility for making their own choices. Choices that are founded upon Scouting values and methods. 

A further quest for identity

I have been continuing my exploration of identity, after some carefully worded searching on the Open University library (not sure what I am going to do without it). The next few blog posts are a summary of some of the papers that I read on my long train journey yesterday to see family.

The Extended Self in a Digital World (Belk, 2013)

Russell Belk is a professor in business and marketing and his discussion focuses on how possessions are an extended part of our identity. This paper was so fascinating that I even discussed it over lunch. It is interesting to come to discussions about identity from a different place, and his paper looks at rewriting an earlier work about possessions, and how digital possession might change how we view and create identity. The digital world means that many of our possessions are now ‘invisible’ (like music, film), and what was once private collections has now become public. The paper discusses whether that means that we no longer view possessions in the same way, or does it mean that we alter how we use and view these possessions as a wider part of our identity.

The key concept is that possessions serve as markers for others to form impressions of us, and are cues for individual and collective meaning. Belk notes that digital good can change our behaviour. They can stimulate consumer desires, and help actualise possible daydreams or impossible fantasies (by becoming a wizard in world of Warcraft or building a village), but they also serve to facilitate experimentation. However, the problem with digital possessions is the uncertainty over ownership. Belk asks if their roles change when we turn off the device, but I think this is no different from the collections you keep in the attic, or the music and films that sit on shelves.

This prompted discussion during lunch around how digital things might have change our own personal possession. We are moving house soon and have started to ‘declutter’. We have ‘got rid of’ a number of dvds (from a collection of over 500), books and cds. Several years ago I said that I would never have a kindle – now – I wouldn’t be without it. I have come to realise that my love of books wasn’t the physical object, but the places that they took me. I still feel the same emotions towards reading and treasure some of the stories, but I don’t need to keep the physical book. I love my kindle and find that a physical book constrains me being able to just pop it in my bag for those odd moments. It’s the same with music. My whole music collection fits on a disk that fits in my phone. I have listened to more music in the last year than I did the previous ten years before. Why. Because it fits in my pocket, and I can play it whenever there is a moment. My walk to work everyday has afforded a great deal of opportunity to revisit albums from my youth, and long train journeys home from training weekends, let me rest my brain and listen to new albums.  So music suddenly has been repackaged and repurposed in my life. I guess this is about the fact that possession are extended parts of us, and it’s how we use it, rather than the physical presentation of it that is important. But what digital possessions have meant for me, is that I get to explore my heritage and discover new things that will potential help me reconfigure my identity for now.

Getting back to Belk, there are a number of other points he makes, which many others also make, about the natural of the digital world. Our representations of ourselves can be fictional (online games and virtual worlds) or real-life (blogs, forums and social media). What we have started doing more of, is sharing our possessions, as a way of enhancing our sense of self: self-portraiture, self-reflection, and self-confession. I really important point that I had not really consciously considered, but is acknowledged by many of the writers about digital identity, is that less face to face contact encourages more self-disclosure. And most social networks afford self-disclosure as the heart of their existence. Belk tells us that this means there is more self-revelation (and this is acceptable, in fact a necessity) , a loss of control, more shared digital possessions and aggregated self (there’s lots of little bits of us joined together) and a shared sense of space. It means that the construction of self is more social, and focus on affirming our existence in a social world, while building an ‘extended’ self. But it also means that we start to have a more distributed memory, where the digital world gives us digital clutter, as well as different narratives of self, and digital cues to our sense of past.

Belk, R. W. (2013). Extended self in a digital world. Journal of Consumer Research, 40(3), 477-500. [online] Available at: http://www.dies.uniud.it/tl_files/utenti/crisci/Belk%202013a.pdf

Digital Inclusion and a different lens for my project

As you can see, it's been two weeks since my last confession! Work means that sometimes I purge on study over a few days. A bit like watching a good tv show...honest!

In the meantime, I have tweaked my project and found some key resources to link in to it.






Government Digital Inclusion strategy

It's not often that I come across something from the government and think...ohhh....this will be useful. However the inclusion strategy, which I had already heard about, was.

The UK Government defines digital inclusion as ‘having the right access, skills, motivation and trust to confidently go online’ (Cabinet Office, 2014). 

The strategy sets out how the government and partners from the public, private and voluntary sectors will increase digital inclusion. This means helping people become capable of using and benefiting from the internet. Now there are many discussions one can have around this strategy but in the context of my project it does two things. Firstly, it shows that there is a political context for inclusion (and my next task is to do a Political, Economic, Social, Technological - aka PEST analysis). Secondly it breaks down the barriers into a nice four piece set:

There are 4 main kinds of challenge people face:

• access - the ability to actually go online and connect to the internet
• skills - to be able to use the internet
• motivation - knowing the reasons why using the internet is a good thing
• trust - the risk of crime, or not knowing where to start to go online

Looking at each in more detail, we can see that digital exclusion involves some significant and wide ranging challenges. When someone has the access, skills, motivation and trust to go online to do things that benefit them day to day, they are digitally capable.

Tinder, Digital inclusion

My project’s aim is to explore barriers in relation to making the online world accessible to volunteers, focusing on motivational and trust barriers. 

Firstly, the ‘access’ barriers relate to connectivity and availability, over which the organisation has less influence. Secondly there already exists a wealth of debate about the ‘skills’ barrier, and it is assumed adults will need to learn new skills. My theory is, that when I do my PEST analysis, many of these will come up, as access and skills are top of the 'things we can probably do something about'.

Motivation an trust

The ‘motivation’ and ‘trust’ barriers are social and psychological, as well as practical barriers to digital inclusion. These barriers require people to explore their fears about safety and identity, and be able to translate their ‘offline’ selves to the ‘online’ world. 

My project activities will look at existing research and practices to identify the issues surrounding these barriers, in order to educate volunteers and provide a sound basis for taking an approach that links back to the values and methods of Scouting. For me these barriers are all about social empowerment.

Does inclusion matter?

The simple answer is yes. If education is a life-long process of development as an individual and as a part of society then adults as well as young people should be participating and interacting online. However there are challenges to overcome in assisting online participation. 

Reality bites. Project planning and back to the drawing board.

We are now in week 6 of the module and at the final, crucial stages of thinking about our project plans and preparing for our first assignments. In true Sam fashion I had loads of ideas and thought about lots of different topics. Part of this module is about thinking and creating out loud, so here's some of the thoughts and processes that I have been through so far.

Phase 1: Initial thoughts (aka: lots of excitement and creativity but all over the place)

Originally I was focused on inclusion as a theme, mainly because a lot of the work I do is based around inclusion - and how we help people become a part of something, or make sure that we don't exclude. 

Power: In particular I am fascinated by power. So I thought about doing something that focused on power and inclusion. I talk alot about power dynamics in training especially as many of the topics I deliver are sensitive, and I work with volunteers and young people, so power is important. Power is about making the language we use accessible and the way we approach our relationships. but it's also about giving people power to take action in their own right.  I think openness and power has some links to identity but also acceptance, whether it's academic/non-academic/age/gender/experience/disciplines

Changing relationships:I also had thoughts around creating a new discipline (innovation) and whether there were ways that the informal (non-academic) can influence the formal (academic). This has a direct link to something I want to do, and also links to implementation. In the charity/youth work field, there is no such thing as trainer training or qualifications in many of the subject areas we become experts in. So for example, my peer network and I talk to each other a lot about values based training especially in safeguarding. I would love to create a kind of open studio for us to develop resources together and share our expertise more widely and openly. Thus not only helping other practitioners, but also changing culture and teh way that people think about the subject area. I think our approach is already innovative, but by creating something open and online. Does a discipline/education/field have to start in academia?

The journey:Journeys through openness started to fascinate me too following a couple of tweets with George Veletsianos (the author of one of the papers I read whom I exchanged some tweets with.) and some of discussions about what we do, I started thinking about journeys. So here I am thinking about are there routes to openness, and do different disciplines afford different routes? Therefore how do decide on the best approach? So just like doing needs and people analysis in training, can we tailor an approach for different people?

Phase 2: 3 potentials topics.... (28th October and thought I was doing well!)

I then shared with my tutor group three potentials areas where I had ideas, in order to ask comments and get some feedback in what direction to go (below is the exert from the forum)

1. Bursting the bubble: Building digital networks that improve professional practice. Here I was thinking about how networks actually inform and develop practice. In particular I wanted to focus on this idea of making sure you have diversity of voice (filter bubble) and so your network has many voices, or at least you know how to chose the ones that will actively challenge and help you develop. There might also be something about how you measure that effectiveness (I am not sure that you can 100%, but so far there is a lot of anecdotal evidence about this but I am not sure there is so much research on outcomes/outputs). (As Louise is doing something about communities of practice then I might move this down my list

2. Seeing the tree from the woods: discoverability of non-academic Open educational resources. In this I was thinking about inclusion as welll as innovation and implementation. In my professional life I am non-academic, and I think that when you look for resources, then academic resources trump non-academic. This is probably because this is not a priority for, for example, charitable organisations. So this one was about recognising the dominance of academia, and considering how to get heard. There are a few ways that this could be honed to be more specific too.

3. Journeying the open landscape : can blogging lead to academic publishing for the non-academic scholar. Back on my non-academic thing again. I am really interested in the different journeys that digital scholars take, and also how people develop. I found a blog post as a starting point, and this is something that I think that I want to do as a practitioner....I think again this could have links to inclusion innovation and implementation

I had pretty much settled on the third option, as it linked to this idea of journeys, and my creative part of my brain was thinking about the imagery of journeys and how it would make a great little project artefact, with things like 'what to wear' for identity, 'what to pack' for tools, 'travelling companions' for building your network etc.

Phase 3: journeys of a digital scholar (or trying to go around the world in 84 days)  

So is started to flesh out my ideas, and considered my approach.

Postcards from a digital scholar"  From theory to practice:Blogging as a foundation for digital scholarship .My theme would be implementation, and basically my plan is to blog my way through the project/module, picking up on each of the themes that are suggested along the way in the module, with a particular focus on blogging and my practice/experience of blogging. My initial thoughts are that there is a lot of information out there about blogging, and this approach is not necessarily new, but if I want to improve my own practice then I need to review the research and practice there is, and reflect on what that means for my own practice and actually do it.

Therefore my artifact would probably be a 'journey planner' of some of the key considerations of using and implementing blogging, (for a practitioner who is not connected to a learning institution)  and I am thinking of a multimedia approach. (4th November 2014)

Now hear, let this be a lesson to you.....

I started to look at potential research and resources, and had got a few good suggestions and ideas from my fellow students. However I was starting to find it difficult to find exactly what I wanted. I then sat down on the 6th November and did a project timetable, with key dates and the actual number of days that I would be able to commit to the module and complete assignments. I realised that I was probably aiming too high, trying too hard and potential not going to have the time to cover what I wanted to. The module materials are quite good in suggesting that you think 'realistically' about what you can accomplish. Although I was still interested in my area, I just didn't have the time to learn and research a whole new subject area. 

I contacted my tutor and had a discussion about this and my proposal for a new idea, based on existing knowledge and an area of work that would also benefit from my final artifact. It was really important at this stage to make that decision and to be aware that my intended project was way out of scope for what could be realistically completed. 

So here's me telling my fellow students...and I will talk about my new project shortly.

          

Degrees of openness - identity, networks and visualisations

Maintaining a presence

One of the questions asked around degrees of openness was whether we ‘maintained’ a social media presence. This in itself is an interesting question, as ‘maintained’ suggests that I am creating my persona. Now most of us at first thought would probably say ‘no’. As it suggest some form of narcissism or manipulation. However we do, do this everyday, as I have mentioned in a previous post. What we wear, how we speak, where we go, the groups we join are all part of creating ‘brand me’ (it’s a new buzzword which I credit Dave Coplin as I heard it from him first). 

So I think that I probably do maintain my identity. After all, I choose what pictures I am going to use on my profile, the background etc. On Twitter I choose hat to retweet and what to favourite – and at times there has been stuff that I find interesting, but that I haven’t ‘favourited’ because it might be just be a little too challenging.

Because my presence, isn’t just about me is it? It’s about those I have connected with too. And they deserve my trust and respect. So how to manage personal space in an online environment? And should I? (Thoughts on the back of a virtual postcard please!). So, sometimes I will post boring stuff like where I am going and what I am doing (although, it’s not often I post what I am having for tea). We network online because we want to feel connected. If you are my friend on Facebook (and I am afraid that’s only for family and friends/colleagues who I have a close connection with, or one or two old uni friends who make me smile), then you will be able to tell when I am writing an essay or home alone, as I post more often! I guess it’s because I want to feel connected. So I guess I use Facebook for personal space, whereas I use Twitter for more ‘social’ space.

Networks and visualisations

One of the tasks this week has been to explore visualisations, and what they might tell us about our networks, or not. I love a good picture so found this fun.

mentionmapp. This app visualises your networks, which is kind of interesting, but it only does it over a period of time. 

The idea is great, as you can then click in to look at the networks of your networks. It could be a really useful tool to show other practitioners how you are connecting, and how links are made.

Twitonomy

This needs a page all to itself! But it was interesting to look at some of the data and graphics around my use of twitter. Apparently I tweet about 5 times a day. I was

interested in the graphs that show who I retweet, mention and talk to as this shows maybe some of the more proactive relationships in my network, or maybe those people I find most interesting/useful.

Good to see that my work hashtag #scoutsafe is the one I have used most (I definitely need to get batter at the hashtag, as I am starting to realise how useful they can be from a data perspective)

I was intrigued by the 'times I tweet', which show that Wednesday is my peak day, but also probably highlight the patterns of internet use over the day (peaking at lunchtimes!) and show when I am asleep! I guess all of these analytics, especially the follows and the retweets could be useful if I was trying to improve my 'presence'. It's a lot of data to think about.

Just so you know...I rescinded the permissions to access my data after using them.....

Am I a digital scholar?

For a pragmatic reflector, I am spending a lot of time this week thinking. Not so much action. The first question I have been pondering is whether or not I am a scholar. I have struggled with this question throughout my master's journey, as a lot of online education, focuses on formal education.I guess I am an informal educator. I work with adults, and sometime young people, outside of academic institutions. I need to get over this, as although a great many of the approaches and the research are about 'academics', they are not the only 'scholars' inhabiting the network In fact some might say they were the minority.

A Digital scholar according to the great wiki is someone who uses "digital evidence, methods of inquiry, research, publication and preservation to achieve scholarly and research goals"

Martin Weller http://www.slideshare.net/mweller/ten-lessons-in-digital-scholarship

So. I spend a lot of time online. Connecting with others. Researching. Reading. 'Discovering' new things.There isn't a lot of formal learning for my area of practice (or at least I haven't found it yet, but I am a bit of a hybrid) and therefore if I don't seek out new knowledge for myself, then there would be few other places to go. I then use that knowledge in my day to day work and in developing the resources for my organisation. So there you go. On almost a day to day basis I am learning online, integrating this into my current knowledge and experience in order to apply practically to my work and the training that I deliver. However the 'digital' part at the moment is mainly acquisition, and participation through networking with others. I haven't yet 'created'. I guess you could call this blog a creation, but really it's just a means to direct my reflections is an organised way.

Actually. I may have been tough on myself there. I am in factor a digital learner. My Masters has been completed through online methods, with very little face to face contact (I met my tutor four times on the last module - that was nice). So as a student I have been learning, researching, applying and creating in a digital environment. It seems therefore a good place to be, as I am undertaking my final masters module then, that I am pondering how I move from a digital learner to a digital trainer/teacher/scholar?

What the 'yuf' think - freedom of expression online

Those who know me,understand that I get very passionate about listening to young people's voice. Now I don't mean what they tell you at school or the information that comes in from surveys. I mean sitting down, face to face and asking good honest questions. 

I don't get to work with young people all that much, so when I do get a chance, I seize it. Last week I was asked if I could gather some thoughts from young people about freedom of expression online. 
Here's what a group of Scouting teenagers, boys and girls, aged 14 - 17 in Lincoln said about freedom online:

·         "Freedom is being able to talk about or express your views or beliefs without being judged or criticised....."

·        " Freedom of expression comes with the risk of being judged by other people"

·         "The internet allows you freedom but you need to be careful"

·         

·         "Freedom means that you can express yourself, but is not just about saying and doing what you want, you have to act/behave within the social norms of the community"

·         "There’s no such thing as 100% freedom, as you have to be held accountable for your actions. That is a good thing. Anonymity serves as a screen, but you can’t be completely hidden"

·         "Freedom of expression is the ability to be myself, as long as it doesn’t upset someone else."

·        " I have freedom to express my thoughts and opinions, as long as I don’t offend or segregate others, and that is good."

·         "Freedom can have a negative effect, and I see many of the people at school being brainwashed, or conforming to what they think is right and acceptable. Sometime the internet exaggerates this, so for those of us who are ‘different’, it’s even harder, despite the fact that it should be easier."

·         "The law should help to tell you what is morally right, and thus freedom should be determined through those boundaries"

·         "Freedom unfortunately means that if you express yourself you can be mocked or bullied"

·        " For some people the internet gives them more freedom to be themselves, and explore their ‘real’ personalities. However the internet can also allow them to create a distorted version of themselves – the person they think they should be in order to conform, but it’s not really them, so they are becoming less free."

·         "Downside of freedom is that people can say stuff that they might not say otherwise, and it might stick with them for a long time"

·         "The media makes the internet seem like a more dangerous place than it is, and it’s hard to get parents to understand that it’s OK."

·         "Everyone has a right to a private and a family life, and so boundaries are very important."

·         "You could say that there is too much freedom. With freedom comes responsibility, and I don’t think that some people are behaving responsibility or respecting people online"

·         "We all self censor – we think about what we are doing and who is following us/friends with us. Therefore we don’t say things on facebook that might worry or upset some of the those people. We carefully think about the image we give and the things we write"

I love asking kids questions, whatever their age, and because I don't have children myself, or work directly with children, I often find that they tell me things they might not tell others, because I listen and ask questions of them. It would seem that young people have the same dilemmas as us, but the ones that I talked to, were clear about responsibility.
In a week when we are thinking about identity and openness, it's sobering to think that people of all ages are having the same thoughts and discussions.

So remember, with great freedom comes great responsibility.... and thanks to all the Young Leaders of Lincolnshire County Scouts for talking with me.

Identity and openness

Last week kicked off on Twitter with Tim Berners Lee talking about a new model for privacy on the internet. The discussion focussed on the need for people to take control and ownership of data, and that the fear of big data and being spied on has make us distrusting......

...therefore do we need to be more comfortable in sharing information and does there need to be better ways of protecting our privacy? 

Of course, when apps request potential access to your data, without telling you what they might use it for, it’s easy to see why people might be distrustful. I was always taught that data protection meant not collecting data that you don’t need, and telling people what you are going to do with that data ( see the recent Whisper stories for an example of companies approaches to privacy and changing terms and conditions).

We often don’t pay much attention to the permissions requests when we sign up to new services. There is a growing distrust of what companies are doing with our data, and I wonder if that has a knock on effect to our ideas of identity and openness?

At the other end of the extreme Pyschology today published an article on why we over share online and the disinhibition effect. The article talks about how anonymity and invisibility cause people to behave in very different ways. It ends however with a bit about authority and how people can feel there is more equality online so they feel more empowered to say the things they may not say offline. I wonder if that is true when it comes to peer creation and peer review?

Most e-safety training starts with asking people if they have googled themselves, or what kind of digital footprint they are creating. (For the record, my take is that we should create positive footprints online, and therefore I encourage adults and young people to use the net creatively, actively and positively : if they want to). Which moves me on to perceptions of others. Most humans worry about what others think of them, even those who say they don’t. When asking a group of teenagers about freedom online this weekend, they were very clear that they had freedom, but that with that freedom comes responsibility; to act appropriately , but also to be called into account if you do something wrong. They also told me how they managed their media. So if they were friends with family on Facebook, then they self-edit what they post there.

But what does this mean for the developing, networked professional? As this week on H818 is about Openness and Privacy, it seems right to be thinking about what this means to me. In the “offline world” I approach people, tasks and work in very different ways, depending on my colleagues, the audience or the environment.  It’s a bit like deciding what clothes to put on. Different audiences require different approaches, in order to engage at the right level (I am thinking about power here), be culturally sensitive, and to communicate the right messages. I am pretty sure this is true when it comes to digital scholarship too. You have to figure out which are the groups you need to join, how to communicate and which communities/resources/publishers are the ones that you need. But where do you start if you are outside of academia. This is something that I will be investigating.

In fact, these thoughts of identity pervade all aspects of our life, whether it’s getting a job, a partner, or a publishing deal. Some of the things that I am involved in outside of work, are partly as a result of what I do in work. I am lucky that I have found a passion in my work, which means I want to part of the bigger debate and I want to be an active voice in making change. However, does my involvement in these things impact my work? I am after all a spoke-person for my organisation, but it doesn’t mean that I am always talking on behalf of my organisation. Hopefully, given that we are values-based, there won’t be too much conflict, but I have become acutely aware of this, and just as I wrestle with my identity and openness as an online practitioner, so I wrestle with my identity and openness as an “offline” practitioner.  And this takes me back to the end of the last blog post. Sometimes, we cannot decide what we share or how open we are, as our jobs (think teachers using Facebook) or circumstances (say foster parents) tell us otherwise.

“My job does not define me”. This was one of my take-away notes following our staff conference, where we were talking about collaboration and team-working across teams and finding and developing expertise. But in order for people to understand this, they need to engage with me, talk to me, work with me, and see my creations. And I think this is the same journey that one must take as an online practitioner. I will be defined by what people see, what I do and how I engage.  

I want to end this post with this fab video from iDea. I think it's a great poem and visual about collaboration and some of the questions that I have (despite me not really be part of that generation)

Endings, beginnings and questions about identity

This week has been about many things, but there all have interwoven themselves across my week, with similar themes popping up into different contexts, converging like a flock of swallows.

On the frivolous end of the spectrum, endings have come in the form of the end of the last series of 24 and Supernatural and the start of new series of Homeland and Gotham (I am very excited about this and you now have an insight into some of the deeper aspect of me). However endings and beginnings were also part of our staff conference on Monday and Tuesday, as we moved out of a period of consultation and into a restructure, and new ways of working. Endings also manifested themselves through the final stages of completing my NSPCC safeguarding trainer training portfolio, although I still have a few thousand words of reflection to write. And beginnings of course as we move into week two of H818 and we start to find our feet as co-learners. It has been particularly challenging to move back into a study routine that involves regular interaction, after studying a module which was predominantly individual working….so bear with me guys!

Power and openness were themes that emerged strongly from the staff conference, where we spent time thinking about identity and team work, and how we can learn to work better together. I worked with colleagues from another department to facilitate the initial team building sessions, which is no mean feat when there are 150 people. We used the activities that we often use with young people, as it generally doesn’t matter how old you are, learning about each other and building trust is the same. The first activity was about asking the right questions and deciding on how much of ourselves we want to give away. People were asked to talk about themselves and then try and find something in common with the person they were talking to. Deciding what to share ultimately leads to different questions and interactions. Some people feel comfortable and confident in sharing more personal aspects of themselves than others do. This is no different online.

We create personas that we are happy with. For some the commonalities may be where they live or the music they like. But if you are willing to give a little bit more of yourself away, you often get a little bit more back, and before you know it a 37 year old woman who works in safeguarding (that’s me), finds that the thing she has in common with the 22 year old male IT service desk analyst is that they both wanted to be vets but got bored of science (teenagers are fickle!).

If we want to be ‘networked practitioners’ then we need to consider identity and openness. I need to identify my role as an individual, but I also need to find things in common with others to start building those networks. And that requires asking questions and giving a bit of me away. We have talked this week, as students, about how we use networking tools like Twitter, and started defining a difference between professional and personal. This is a great place to start the discussions about openness. The more confident I become as a practitioner, the more comfortable I feel about sharing bits of myself, which are maybe more personal.

The connecting cultures iceberg 

(Adapted from L. Robert Kohls’ “Cultural Iceberg”)

 http://www.connectingcultures.org/philosophy.asp

It’s a bit like the cultural iceberg (which came up at a different network meeting later on in the week). As individuals, we consist of our history, experiences and social worlds. Most people see the visible us. But it’s the moments when we share the invisible us, and the common humanity, that we start to develop trust and a better understanding of each other.

For me, my online identity (mainly through twitter), has developed as I grow more confident and share more of myself and my identity, just as it does in the ‘offline’ world. The professional me is the personal me, as it’s all a part of my identity. So it seems that we manage our identities in all aspects of life. We decide when it’s appropriate to share and when it’s not. But of course it’s not always our choice.