Digital and Technological Identity

The aspect of digital identity, which can be simply defined as “who you are online”, that stands out most to me is its purported purpose. The reading from the first week of this class by Tammy B. Salman, Who Am I Online? Cultivating Students’ Digital Identity Practices, has a quote that stands out to me: “If critical thinking, communication, and problem-solving are among the top skills sought by employers, in what ways can educators help students … develop a digital identity to demonstrate key skills?” (Salman, 31). This quote seems innocuous, but contains two major implications that the rest of it’s section of the reading shares: first, that because employers look at the social media accounts of potential employees, social media engagement should serve the purpose of forming a social identity that pleases employers, and second, that the value of a digital identity that exhibits strong critical thinking and similar characteristics lies in the way it appeals to employers.

The bulk of the video attached below is irrelevant to this discussion, but in the section carved out by the time code, Dan Olsen delivers a short framing of the history of institutionalised education as a conflict between two core motivations: a set of philosophical motivations that hold that the value of education is inherent and that a society that teaches its people is morally good, and a set of industrial motivations that hold that education exists to create productive workers. In practice, education must prepare people for jobs, that is the most powerful justification for the price tag at the end of the day, but the wholesale handing over of educational purpose to industrialists carries dehumanising effects that Dan Olsen outlines in this clip. 

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Returning to Salmans writing, the quote I highlighted demonstrates the requirement to shape students into appealing workers as an unquestioned assumption of educational purpose. Digital identity is an enormous part of the lives of my generation; it is an expression of self that is closely tied to the way we are seen and see others, and regardless of the practical benefits of keeping this identity sanitised for corporate consumption, doing so should be lamented as a sign that the internet exists not for freedom or expression but as, first and foremost, an avenue for surveillance. This is not a problem that can be solved in an EDCI 339 blog, but I can state categorically that unthinkingly absorbing industry-first reshaping of identity into what we as educators want to give our students cannot be done without consequence. We need to value critical thinking because it is a way to see deeper into the truth of the world around us, not simply because it checks boxes for an HR department.

Digital Platforms in Education

Platforms in educational technology are locked in an endless battle against profit. As the web began to boom in popularity, the inclusion of popular websites like Facebook into educational practice naturally rose in appeal, but as the hype-fog cleared, this became less attractive. An increasing “you are the product” understanding of free online services meant that you could not ethically force or even necessarily encourage students to give their educational data to websites that see that information as a source of profit, and if that data was stored in other countries or under a problematic company policy, the security issues would made the platform unacceptable. The Tedx Talk by Fred Cate below serves as a deeper dive into the state of data selling that makes this such a concern. This is among the central conflicts of edtech: the practices software companies use to make money are often against the interests of educational ethics.

The consequence of this is that the smoothest, most advanced products with the most polished interfaces shouldn’t be allowed in. The standard cycle for tech that I saw during my elementary and high school years was as follows: 1. A new website does something fun and useful, 2. everyone starts using it all the time, 3. either the school administration notices and realises it’s selling student data or the site determines that it’s hooked in enough users to start charging for its service, and 4. it goes away. What was left were programs commissioned by or contracted with school districts, which were clunky, often hard to use and understand, probably cost the schools more than they should, and communicated to the students who crammed into the computer labs to use them that nothing fun was about to happen. MyEd eportfolios are the prime suspect from my memory, with their usage inconvenient, their purpose entirely unclear to us as students, and their improvements to learning being largely absent. 

Google for Education is the exception to the rule, working itself into much of our school system, though not unquestioned. The only reason that Google has remained in our school systems as an enormous and well-polished tech company is by promising that it does not collect or sell student data, but the only reason it can hold to that promise, if it does, is that people who have been using the Google Work Suite since they were 9 years old will probably keep doing so into adulthood, at which point their data is fair game. It’s the classic soda pop strategy: get ’em while they’re young, and you’ll keep ’em forever.

The purpose and usefulness of digital educational platforms will always be locked up in their politics, policies, and contracts. All educators can do is stay vigilant and exercise whatever powers they have to keep tech on their side.

Instructor and Social Presence in Online Learning

In my first blog post in this class, I wrote that the main problem I had engaging with online learning was the deficiency of the human aspect. Indeed, much digital ink has been spilled in this class tackling the issue. Where’s the Teacher? Defining the Role of the Instructor Presence in Social Presence and Cognition in Online Education by Cathy L. Barnes explores the issue of teacher presence through personal experiences of strengths and inadequacies of past teachers and a dive into the theories and following practices that underpin the field.

In this reading, Barnes points out the issue of experience, where university professors have years of experience in their field but very little in the field of education itself, leading to a fundamentally poor structure in teaching, and indeed, we feel the effects of this every day. Even the people I know earning their Bachelors of Music in Education frequently complain that they have been assigned over a hundred pages of readings per week including such advise as “learning should be thoughtfully paced.” Online education inflames this issue, as the work you need to do to make it function is often demanding and unintuitive. Barnes’ recommendation to offer audio feedback strikes me as particularly likely to affront many professors, and even I would imagine it would be a nightmare to do take two of your 40th students’ assignment feedback after tripping over your words again. 

As online education continues to evolve and grow in popularity and institutions continue to expand its role in their road maps, professors will need to develop into educators nearly as much as they are experts to keep up with the comparatively complex demands of its successful implementation. This will be met with resistance and will likely require more resources allocated and standards raised, but few things worth doing are neither.