Today, perhaps more of our time is spent on online interactions compared to those taking place in ‘real life’. Hence, the This week’s topic (i..e, online participation and digital literacies) was interesting and relevant for both educational and personal reasons. The first activity for this topic was the webinar by D. White who held an engaging and interactive session about how we switch back and forth between different spaces (i.e., personal vs. professional) and roles (i.e., visitor vs. resident) during the time we spend in the digital world. What I liked most about White’s framework is that, unlike some of the well-known taxonomies, it is not assigning fixed labels to individuals (e.g., digital natives vs. immigrants). Instead, White brings up the importance of context and how our roles, expectations, skills, challenges and possibilities could change depending on where we go at a given point in time.
The collective task assignment involved a scenario, wherein the main protagonist is feeling a discomfort with trying to get familiar with new digital tools (e.g., blogging), mingling of private and professional lives and leaving digital footprint in a professional context. Going though other ONLers blog posts for this week’s topic made me realize that other students relate to the protagonist’s worries about keeping private digital presence separated from professional one, questions about skills required to thrive in the digital environment and the level of personal digital literacy. Therefore, whether or not we like it, our educational activities will move more and more towards the digital world and it is inevitable that we – as teachers – will develop our digital identity in this realm.
Turning back to my own story, I keep a very low digital profile. I chose not to be present in the platforms many people use for their personal (e.g., Instagram, Facebook) and/or professional (e.g., LinkedIn, Twitter) identities. This means that I do not have a considerable digital identity in the personal context (the vertical axis on White’s model) which could possibly get intermixed with my digital activities in the professional context. The scope of digital activities concerning my profession, on the other hand, has been quite well-structured with clear boundaries. In a way, I’d like to see my professional digital identity as one being quite impersonal. While teaching, my role as an educator is well-defined in the course syllabi. Therefore, I use that as my framework when determining the level and scope of my interaction with students online and offline. The impersonal nature of my digital presence becomes even more vivid when I put on my researcher hat and leave my footprints in the form of article publications. As a positivist researcher, I do not believe that who I am as a person matters at all when it comes to the validity and verifiability of my scientific claims.
So, in a way, I feel that my digital presence is confined only to the professional domain where I see my role and activities within a clearly delineated framework. Within that framework, I have not so far experienced any problems with moving into the resident role. And given that I do not have a significant digital identity in the personal domain, I have not experienced any challenges associated with mingling of different roles in different spaces.
But now I am starting to think if I can sustain this in the long-term. Would my students think that I am too aloof as a teacher? I remember that I once had an “introduce yourself” session with my students where I did not share anything about myself other than what you can read in my CV. This was because I believed neither my hobbies nor the name of my cat has any bearing on the quality of education I could provide to my students. Yet, is it possible to develop a meaningful relationship with students this way? In today’s world where everyone is accustomed to interact with everyone else in different ways, is my role as teacher going to be re-defined?
