Professional Digital Identity
Professional Digital Identity, what is it, why do we need it, and how can we create it and maintain it? These are the questions that I wish to explore in this short blog post.
A Professional digital identity is a set of characteristic online that would define one professionally. I believe that most people would have a personal identity online, and many would wonder where is the line between our work and social persona? Personally I believe that there is very little difference between the two, and your actions in one realm would definitely affect the other. There are couple of cases where statements made by scholars or public figure online have detrimental effect on their professional life, even till the extent of ending their career.
Being a reckless and mindless youth growing up during the infancy of social media, I have left behind some rather unsightly footprint on the internet. Blog posts that would make me cringe today, or photographs which acts as a reminder of what not to do. When I step into the work force as a teacher in a public school, the first thing on my mind was not to create or build a professional digital identity, but to erase the traces of my past. In my mind, I was aware that what everything that I post online, shapes the way people view me, and it might even affect my career back then as a teacher. After a while, I make it a point not to post anything online, or comment on articles I see on social media.
There are many ways one can build their professional digital identity online.
Other than the platforms meant for certain profession, one can also look to other less formal platform where they can share their view and opinions. Instructor who conduct MOOC on open education platform such as coursera or EdX can also consider their presence on those platform as part of their professional digital identity.
However, while prepping myself for my ONL lesson , I realized that I have missed out years of building a professional digital identity. As learning move online, learners attending online course feels that teachers or instructors that have a identity as a human online would make the course more engaging. And this is something I will remind myself to do when create courses in the future. I also realised that having a clear online presence would allow the rest of the internet to build one for you. Maybe sometime, one should google their name to see how the internet perceive them.
