#ICTEdu Youth Media Team with mentors

Something special happened in County Tipperary last Saturday. At the ICT in Education Conference at LIT Thurles, Pamela O’Brien and the conference organisers stretched the boundaries of the usual conference format. The conference theme of “Student Voices” was embraced, with young voices to the fore. As described by Pam Moran in her conference reflection: at #ICTEdu “adults didn’t talk about children in their absence, but rather listened to children in their presence.” The result was powerful learning, a new appreciation for what’s possible, and big plans (already) for embracing this model even further.

In my previous post I described some of the unique aspects of the #ICTEdu conference. The conference attracts educators from across all education sectors, from within Ireland and beyond. Educators meet to discuss, to share resources, and to share ideas about learning and teaching. As has been the case in recent years, an excellent programme of workshops and keynotes was organised. The heart of the conference, however, was the group of young people who participated in the conference as the Youth Media Team: speaking, interviewing, photographing, tweeting and blogging. The Youth Media Team (easily spotted in their red shirts) was mentored by another great team: Bernie Goldbach, Conor Galvin and Joe Dale. The mentors listened, answered questions and advised, but mostly encouraged each member of the Youth Media Team to engage with people at the conference, and beyond, and to create their own media and narrative of the day. The young people did just that; engaging with and interviewing conference participants — including Junior Minister for Education and Skills Ciaran Cannon — recording their observations and reflections, and speaking about their experiences at the end of the conference.

Two members of Youth Media Team interviewing Minister Ciaran Cannon

Last year’s keynote speakers, Ira Socol and Pam Moran, joined us via Skype before the conference wrapped up, reflecting on the power of young people as learners. In her reflection, Pam highlighted some of the key questions of the day:

“It struck me that we’ve always had two curricula — that of the adults who want to make sure children learn what they need to survive as adults and that of children who are curious and interested in learning about and how to do things not on the adults’ lists. How do we begin to engage in an interface of those two curricula. How do we know what children want to learn if we don’t ask and then listen? How do we provide opportunities for social discourse across generations?”

The #ICTEdu conference model is a great start.

Two members of Youth Media Team interviewing Dr. Maria Hinfelaar, LIT President

It must be acknowledged that student voices were present at the #ICTEdu conference in many other ways as well. The educators presenting and sharing their work at #ICTEdu — and at the lively #CESImeet the previous evening — are doing some of the most innovative and exciting work I know of: creating learning spaces for young people to connect, code and create in classrooms and community settings, as well as online. It would be impossible to summarise all of the workshops, but the following is a taster. Please visit the conference blog and audio interviews recorded by the Youth Media Team for ideas shared by other educators at the conference.

• Mary Jo Bell, a Senior Infants teacher in Dublin, has been using Twitter with her class @MrsBellsClass for over two years. She also uses Animoto, Voki, eportfolios, Skype and Google+. Mary Jo’s Slideshare Technology in the Infant Classroom, well worth sharing, describes how her school’s youngest students are leading the way.
• Maire O’Keeffe, a 5th class teacher in Kinvara, began using digital and social media with her students at the start of this school year. Since September, students have written hundreds of posts on Ms. O’Keeffe’s class blog and had over 138,000 views. Through their blog, class Twitter account (@msokeeffesclass) and Skype, the children connect with other students and teachers around the world.  Maire spoke about the power of the 100 Word Challenge in kickstarting her students’ blogging; she encourages more schools to try it.
• Joe Dale, education and technology consultant in the UK, contributed to the conference in multiple ways. As well as mentoring the Youth Media Team along with Bernie and Conor, Joe shared classroom management apps and a terrific range of audio tools for education at both the #CESImeet and the conference. Grainne Conole, a keynote speaker at the conference, tried out Audioboo after Joe’s workshop and recorded this short interview with Joe, in which he describes some great audio apps for educators (see also joedale.typepad.com).
• Bernie Goldbach, innovative Multimedia lecturer at LIT Thurles, facilitated a workshop also focusing on audio in which he used Audioboo within a live Google+ hangout — a wonderful demonstration of live, global collaboration and learning.
• Each of the three keynote speakers, Grainne Conole, Martha Rotter and myself, explored student voices in the context of learning. I will summarise these in my next blog post.
• And don’t miss the conference doodles by Rachael Cooke, a recent Creative Multimedia graduate from LIT — she added a whole new dimension to the conference with her creative artwork!

Finally, my thanks again to the students: the nine members of  the Youth Media Team and the many, many students who voices and ideas were shared by their teachers during the workshops and presentations. The message from students was loud and clear: more freedom, more choice, more fun, more practical work, more opportunities for connecting and interacting. The message from educators at #ICTEdu was also clear: we are listening. We must move forward together.

#ICTEdu Youth Media Team with conference organiser Pamela O’Brien

Photos by ictedulit All Rights Reserved, used here with permission.

On Saturday, May 11th, educators from across Ireland and beyond will gather at LIT in Thurles, County Tipperary for the annual ICT in Education conference. As described by its organiser, Pam O’Brien, it is a conference “by teachers, for teachers”, and that includes teachers in the broadest sense — primary, secondary and third levels, adult and community education, and beyond. The theme of this year’s conference is “Student Voices”. The wonderful Grainne Conole will be a keynote speaker, sharing her considerable expertise by speaking about learning design and promoting new pedagogies. Grainne also will offer a Learning Design Workshop on Friday, May 10th. A CESI Meet will be held on that Friday evening as well. All of these events can be booked on the ICT in Education website.

This year, I was delighted and honoured to be invited to give a keynote at the conference as well. The topic of my keynote will be “Creating Spaces for Student Voices”. For the past few weeks, I have been enjoying working with other educators and students at primary, secondary and third levels to create ways for their student voices to be present.

To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming. Human beings are not built in silence, but in word, in work, in action-reflection.

— Paulo Freire

Human beings are not built in silence. We delight in the first sounds of babies, the first words of children; we marvel at their acquisition of language. And in classrooms, at all levels of education, what do we ask of growing children and adults? Too often, while we speak, we ask for silence. The architecture of most of our classrooms and lecture halls both reflects and contributes to this. As educators, many of us have rediscovered the power of word, work and action-reflection in our own learning. We speak, we write, we use social media to share and to engage in dialogue. A growing number of educators are inviting students to do the same. Creating opportunities for students to find and share their voices requires openness and a willingness to challenge long-held assumptions and practices – those of our students and institutions as well as ourselves. Catherine will share the voices of students, from all levels of education, as well as her work and the work of other open educators, as she explores ways to create spaces for student voices.

If you’ve never participated in the #ICTedu conference, I can only describe it as something special. The conference is a unique opportunity for educators to connect — across sectors and all the usual boundaries — to meet, discuss and share ideas about learning and teaching. I attended the conference for the first time in 2011 where I met Mary Jo Bell who had just started using Twitter with her Junior Infants class; I shared this with my 2nd year BSc students and we exchanged tweets with Mary Jo’s class. I met Simon Lewis and Rozz Lewis, editors of anseo.net, and Damien Quinn, creator of seomraranga.com — all amazing examples of teachers openly sharing their resources and ideas with other educators. I met Mags Amond, dynamo of a secondary teacher and organiser of CESI Meets (Ireland’s own TeachMeets), a teacher of rare wisdom and generosity. In 2012, the ICTedu keynote speakers were Pam Moran and Ira Socol, wonderful human beings and educators with a crystal clear focus on learners, student voice and democracy who are helping others to re-imagine learning spaces.

These and many other educators who I’ve met at #ICTedu have helped me to become a better educator and have enriched my life in many ways. As a 3rd level educator working only with others at 3rd level, I realised how narrow my conception of education had become. I interacted with very few teachers from primary, secondary and other sectors — beyond family and friends and the teachers at my children’s schools. Participating in the ICT in Education conference, as well as the annual CESI conference, CESIMeets and #edchatie weekly Twitter chats, has broadened my understanding and helped me to create a rich and diverse Personal Learning Network (including many new friends). All of these educators have helped me to reflect, to learn, and to improve my teaching practices.

If you will be attending the ICT in Education conference, I look forward to seeing you there. If you won’t be attending, you’ll have the opportunity to connect via Twitter (#ICTedu) and the live stream. Many thanks to Pam O’Brien and all of the organisers — I’m looking forward to a wonderful event!

Image source: CC BY-NC-SA pamelaaobrien

Reblogged from CT231:

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Tomorrow is our last class session of CT231 for 2012-13 with 6 Ignite presentations scheduled -- looking forward to it! (There will be an opportunity next week for students who have had to postpone their presentations to deliver them -- this has been scheduled outside of class time.)  We've covered a lot this year...

Many of these terms may have seemed unclear or irrelevant last September, but hopefully you feel much more confident now about your research skills, your communication  skills (writing and presenting) and -- as many of you wrote in your social media reflections -- your digital identity and use of social media, especially for learning.

Read more… 321 more words

Coordinating a project with students in 5 countries, crossing 12 time zones, and working in different terms has its challenges. But the project coordinators decided at the start to view these differences as an asset. Students in each location share their work and students in other locations can engage and connect — sometimes immediately, sometimes later that day, sometimes much later. As Helen Keegan describes:

“We’re now looking at the ‘tag-team model’ of education: the projects never end, as there is always a cohort to carry on, and lead into the next group, and when they overlap that’s great – that’s where the genuine collaboration happens. …Traditionally, we deliver modules/courses, neatly chunked into 12 weeks, with units of assessment, leading to grades etc. and that’s the way things are (generally) done. I’m not saying scrap all of that, but I do think that modules are best served as springboards to other things. Increasingly, students are connecting across levels and cohorts through Twitter and now we have ex-students getting together with current students, undergrads coming to postgrad classes (and vice versa) as they’ve connected online and have a genuine interest in getting involved in other groups/further curricula outside of their taught modules.”

As the Galway group’s first foray into sharing across those boundaries, CT231 students are posting their Ignite presentations online (via the CT231 Student Showcase), inviting feedback and conversation. In a Google+ hangout last week with NZ colleagues, Thom and Averill asked me if CT231 students would also be willing to post videos of their presentations, as another means of students connecting and sharing. The following day we did a trial run of this in class using the Bambuser app. Bambuser enables live video streaming from mobile phones or webcams. Using the app is simple: one click opens the app, one click records and streams (in public or private), and one click stops recording and uploads to the user’s Bambuser page. Once posted on that page, others can view the video and add comments.

One of our student presenters agreed to be filmed this week so that we could trial the app and learn how best to use it for recording presentations (thanks, Jack!). The experiment was a success and we learned some valuable tips for future recordings. After sharing the video via #icollab, feedback from New Zealand was available to us the following morning (thanks, Thom!). We look forward to extending the collaboration with students in the coming weeks.

Right now I’m looking forward to the next weekly Wednesday night Google+ hangout with Helen, Mar, Ilona, Thom and Averill and discussions with my students the following afternoon, as we collectively create the terms and the vision for #icollab 2013.

Image source: CC BY-SA 2.0 marfis75

Like many educators I know, the start of 2013 has been about MOOCs. I’ve been participating in #etmooc — the Educational Technology & Media MOOC started by Alec Couros, Alison Seaman and a great team, and #edcmooc — E-learning & Digital Cultures, organised by another great team at the University of Edinburgh (and hosted by Coursera). Both have gotten off to lively starts, with thousands participating and activity spread across Google+ Communities, Twitter, Facebook, course blogs and thousands of participant blogs, among other places.

Before diving headlong into Digital Storytelling (Week 4 of #etmooc) and metaphors of the Future in Digital Culture (Week 2 of #edcmooc), I’m pausing to reflect on the learning process, or rather my personal learning process in these courses. I’d participated in other connectivist or cMOOCs previously but only intermittently; a few sessions each of Change11 and #CFHE12 last year. To be honest, I didn’t make a full commitment to either, but in each case I engaged with new ideas, new blogs and new people — all of which was valuable.

My intention this time was to bring something different to my MOOC participation: focus. Even without participating in every webinar, watching every video or reading every article or blog post, I intend to complete each course from start to finish. Like many other participants, my goals at the start were mixed. I want to learn more, through engaging with others, about the areas being explored in each MOOC (connected learning, the open education movement and digital literacies/citizenship in #etmooc, digital and learning cultures in #edcmooc); to contribute to conversations and sessions in areas where I have experience, both as a learner and a teacher (e.g. digital literacies, digital identity); to learn more, through both observation and participation, about organising and facilitating large, open groups of learners; and to challenge my thinking and reflect on my own learning processes. I may already consider myself an open learner and digital scholar, but the more I change my practices — the more I “unlearn” — the more I uncover assumptions and practices which can be (need to be) challenged even further.

Three weeks into #etmooc and one week into #edcmooc… and the water is fine. I started with #etmooc and the energy created there has been phenomenal. In some ways, this has detracted from my #edcmooc experience in that I have less time — but in other ways there is great synergy. This is partly because many people are participating in both MOOCs, but that’s not the only reason. Although I wouldn’t always choose to participate in two MOOCs at once (!) I’m finding that it is possible to be in two MOOC ecosystems at once and to participate and collaborate in and across both.

In Dave Cormier’s excellent #etmooc session on Rhizomatic Learning last week — the source for both the title of this blog post  and the quote by Alec Couros in the image above — he reviewed his 5 steps to succeed in a MOOC: Orient, Declare, Network, Cluster and Focus. As I’m experiencing, first in #etmooc and now in #edcmooc, connected learning can be powerful when it progresses to networking, clustering and focus.

For me this has happened around digital identity — a focus of much of my own learning, teaching and research. Through both Twitter and the Google+ communities for each MOOC, I’ve found others thinking and engaging with the course ideas who are reflecting particularly around issues of identity and digital identity. I’ve engaged in some great discussions after reading thought-provoking blog posts by Angela Towndrow on understanding digital identity and connection, Carolyn Durley on developing a voice as a connected learner, Jen Ross (also a member of the #edcmooc team) on online teacher presence, and (via Jen) Amy Collier on the online teacher’s body. Blogs, and the ensuing conversations, have become my prime place for conversation and learning in both MOOCs.

This mightn’t be the same for everyone — but that is the power of open and connected learning. We define our own paths, we make our own connections, we chart our own learning journeys. At the risk of conflating these two MOOCs (there are, of course, differences), in both #etmooc and #edcmooc there is a strong sense of connection and community, despite the huge scale. Regular sessions — webinars, Twitter chats, Google+ hangouts — are like social glue, as Alec Couros describes, objects for sociality and study. The networking and clustering continue in smaller interest-driven groups. Of course not all participants will have the same experience and as the number and variety of MOOCs (both ‘x’ and ‘c’ varieties) expands there’s still much to learn about MOOCs and scale, accessibility and sustainability. However, in the face of the very public failure of another Coursera MOOC this week, #etmooc and #edcmooc are examples of how connectivist MOOCs can work well to facilitate powerful learning.

Quoting Dave Cormier: “If we make community the curriculum, membership becomes how we scale. It’s all about belonging.”

Image source: CC BY 2.0 Catherine Cronin

As with most MOOCs, the first week of #etmooc was a whirlwind of navigating new spaces, connecting with new people (as well as some old friends) and getting an overall sense of the course and the community. There’s a positive vibe in #etmooc that I’m enjoying. The Google+ community is proving to be a great place for conversations and sharing ideas, resources and feedback.

I welcomed the first week’s challenge of creating an introduction using a new tool. I’d been wanting to try Mozilla Popcorn Maker since learning about it a couple of months ago. Popcorn Maker enables you to enhance, remix and share web content such as links, maps, images, video, audio and live feeds — a unique tool. Well, a few technical setbacks later, and with some expert help from Laura Hilliger, I completed my intro today (not a moment too soon, as it’s the start of Week 2!).

=> my #etmooc intro  (using Mozilla Popcorn Maker)

…

A few fascinating #etmooc posts and conversations over the past couple of days… but that will have to wait for my next post.

And so it begins! Over the next several weeks I’ll be participating in #etmooc, a MOOC defined as somewhere between a course and a community aiming to tend to the latter. #etmooc’s rather broad title is Educational Technology and Media. What’s attracted me is that it’s a connectivist MOOC or cMOOC in which over 1500 people will be working together, collaboratively and cooperatively, on the shared problems of education and society.

The list of co-conspirators for the MOOC is long and varied, but the heart of the group of organizers is Alec Couros, whose passion for open, connected learning is huge.

The topics we’ll explore in #etmooc are Connected Learning, Digital Storytelling, Digital Literacy, The Open Movement and Digital Citizenship. These topics are familiar to many of us — I explore many of them in my own teaching. But I’m hoping that #etmooc will be an opportunity to dig deeper, into the topics and into myself — my assumptions, my “well worn paths” of thinking — to challenge myself and to learn, in community.

Intrigued? Interested? If so, check out the #etmooc website, Google+ community, #etmooc tweets and the blog hub of #etmooc participants. You can join #etmooc for the entire journey or even just occasionally. All are welcome and it’s not too late.

Next blog post, my #etmooc intro… coming soon!

We connect, we learn, we move into the future together.

Image credit: CC BY-SA 2.0 marfis75 

When we ask our students to share online — in a discussion forum within an LMS; in a wiki, course blog, Google Doc or Facebook group; on Twitter or anywhere on the open web — we are inviting not just online interaction but an enactment of each student’s digital identity. Involvement in or resistance to online interaction is largely rooted in ideas and beliefs about identity, privacy, voice, authenticity and power. These ideas and beliefs may be articulated easily or they may previously be unreflected, but they will be invoked each time we ask students to participate online.

As connected educators, it is essential that we think deeply about digital identity — both our own and our students’.

In previous posts, I’ve shared some of my ideas about exploring digital identities with students (Exploring digital identities, Resources for exploring digital identity, privacy and authenticity and Learning and teaching digital literacies). However, when asked recently to facilitate a discussion about digital identity with academic staff as part of the NUI Galway Learning Technologies module #cel263 (short presentation below), I opted not to share specific practices, but instead share some of the key ideas and resources which have helped me to reflect on my own ideas about digital identity and develop my learning and teaching.

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In research on social networking within education, for example, Keri Facer and Neil Selwyn (2010) found that students saw a clear divide between “social interaction” and “educational interaction” on social networking sites, based on existing educational assumptions that “learning is organised around the individual and… oriented around content rather than process”. However, this may be changing. In their review of the research, Facer and Selwyn concluded that educators might need to “pay attention to social networking sites as important for the social construction of identity, including personal, social and learner identity”.

IRL is the international abbreviation for Ireland as well as the acronym for In Real Life…

A key concept in considering digital identity is the relation between the physical world and the digital world, the organic and the technological. Nathan Jurgenson has written extensively about this, coining the term digital dualism to refer to the notion, held by many, of a clear separation between the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’.  Jurgenson refutes digital dualism:

“…our reality is both technological and organic, both digital and physical, all at once. We are not crossing in and out of separate digital and physical realities, a la The Matrix, but instead live in one reality, one that is augmented by atoms and bits. And our selves are not separated across these two spheres as some dualistic “first” and “second” self, but is instead an augmented self. A Haraway-like cyborg self comprised of a physical body as well as our digital profile, acting in constant dialogue. Our Facebook profiles reflect who we know and what we do offline, and our offline lives are impacted by what happens on Facebook…”

Regarding digital identity and digital dualism, as educators we must be willing to critically examine our own assumptions as well as the expectations of our students. Are my online and offline identities enmeshed? Is my online identity reflective only of my professional self, or of me in other contexts as well? How comfortable am I with sharing online — with colleagues, students, an unknown audience? How comfortable are my students? How does the power differential in the educator-student relationship affect the enactment of our digital identities in online spaces? Important questions such as these must be explored. Embracing the notion of an augmented self does not preclude critical analysis of differences in the online/offline experiences of space, time, visibility, privacy and power.

Considerations of digital identity are personal and individual. Yet we negotiate them daily in the enactment of our digital identities — as individuals, citizens, learners and educators. Inviting our students to interact online is not a simple or neutral act. We invite more than just the sharing of information and opinions — we invite an enactment of digital identity in all its complexity. As Facer and Selwyn (2010) conclude:

“…learners need to practice and experiment with different ways of enacting their identities, and adopt subject positions through different social technologies and media. These opportunities can only be supported by academic staff who are themselves engaged in digital practices and questioning their own relationships with knowledge.”

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Additional resources were considered and discussed during the presentation and ensuing discussion, including the following contributions from danah boyd, Bonnie Stewart, Chris “moot” Poole, Alan Levine, Neil Selwyn, Howard Rheingold and Rhona Sharpe, Helen Beetham & Sara de Freitas (as shown below). My thanks to all.

Social Network Sites as Networked Publics by danah boyd @zephoria (2010)

Digital Identities: Six Key Selves of Networked Publics by Bonnie Stewart @bonstewart (2012)

High Order Bit by Chris “moot” Poole @moot (2011) at Web 2.0 Summit

We, Our Digital Selves, And Us – YouTube (2012) by Alan Levine @cogdog (2012)

Social Media in Higher Education by Neil Selwyn @neil_selwyn (2012)

Social Media Literacies syllabus by Howard Rheingold @hrheingold (2012)

Rethinking Learning for a Digital Age: How Learners are Shaping Their Own Experiences, by Rhona Sharpe, Helen Beetham & Sara de Freitas (2010)

I was delighted to join Kim Wilkins (@kimxtom @TeenTechGirls) and Carrie Anne Philbin (@MissPhilbin @GeekGurlDiaries) in presenting a session in the Global Education Conference this week. The week-long online conference is an inspiring model of openness and collaboration, with presenters and participants from across the globe — mostly students and educators, but open to all.

In our session Geek Gurl Diaries: Empowering the Next Generation of Women in Tech we explored the gender gap in computing and technology and shared our experiences and best practices in promoting and changing science, engineering and computer studies to address this gap. Click the link above to view the session (then just click the purple Blackboard Collaborate icon to view). The presentation slides are below:

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Kim Wilkins and Carrie Anne Philbin are quite inspiring tech women themselves! Kim is an educator and technology activist in Virginia (USA) and creator of these excellent Tech Girl resources. You can subscribe to Kim’s Tech Girl newsletter for regular updates.

• Day of the Tech Girl website
• Teen Tech Girls wiki

Carrie Anne is a teacher and digital heroine in London and creator of these excellent Geek Gurl resources — Carrie’s wonderful YouTube videos are well worth sharing with girls.

• Geek Gurl Diaries website
• Geek Gurl Diaries YouTube channel

I joined Kim and Carrie Anne by speaking about girls and women in technology here in Ireland and highlighting some important research on gender and technology. A few key themes emerged in our session:

• The underrepresentation of women in technology has been remarkably persistent over time and across countries. The current proportion of women undergraduates in computing, for example, is 15% in Ireland and the UK, under 20% in the US. Although the proportion of women studying computing and IT was higher in the 1980s and 1990s, computing and IT are now in the same category as other STEM subjects such as engineering and physics in which women are dramatically underrepresented.
• Attitudes toward computing and many STEM subjects are highly gendered. Kim Wilkins cited studies from the US which show that girls form positive or negative attitudes towards technology by age 13. Thus, initiatives to break down gender barriers must be in place in primary school and early secondary school, not just at career choice time.
• Computing — as well as a focus on creating not consuming technology — should be part of education from primary school onwards. But it is not just in school that such initiatives can take place. Local community initiatives such as Coder Dojo, coding clubs for young people, can be powerful opportunities for children to develop coding skills as well as breaking down traditional gender stereotypes about technology. The open, collaborative and peer learning ethos of Coder Dojo attracts many girls as well as boys, as well as many female mentors.
• Long-standing research in the area of gender and technology indicates that while encouraging girls and women to consider careers in computing and technology is important, it is not enough. Initiatives to encourage girls to study STEM subjects have been in place for many years — and still just 15-20% of our undergraduates in these subjects are female. The social construction of STEM itself must be placed under scrutiny. Thus, efforts to address the underrepresentation of women in computing and STEM must include breaking down gender sterotypes held by girls and boys and creating a more inclusive STEM culture which encourages diversity of participation by age, class and race as well as gender.

Our thanks to all of the #globaled12 session participants with whom we engaged in a lively chat session both during and after our presentation. We would love to continue the conversations and develop further collaborations — please contact Kim Wilkins, Carrie Anne Philbin and/or myself (details above).

Additional resources:

Marder, J. (2012, April 25). Why the engineering, computer science gender gap persists. Scientific American.

Varma, R. (2007). Women in computing: The role of geek culture. Science as Culture, 16, 4, 359-376.

Cronin, C. and Roger, A. (1999). Theorising progress: Women in science, engineering and technology in higher education. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 36 (6) pp. 637-661.

This year we are using an open course blog to share our work. Instead of preparing and posting static presentations as class notes, I prepare a blog post after class each week, summarizing what we explored and discussed. Students and others are free to comment and engage in discussion on the blog. Later this term, the course blog also will link to student blogs, as these are developed. We also have a course Twitter account @CT231 which you are invited to follow — or simply check our course hashtag #ct231.

This week’s class on Exploring Digital Identities was fascinating. Students engaged in reflection and discussion both in class and online. We were joined online (via Twitter) by Bonnie Stewart, whose excellent blog post Digital Identities: Six Key Selves of Networked Publics we analysed. The discussion continued on Twitter and on our blog with contributions from @sharonlflynn, @marloft, @tweety4bird and @fboss (so far). Many thanks to you all! Please check out our blog (link below) and feel free to join the conversation — we welcome your thoughts.

>> CT231 Week 6: Exploring Digital Identities

Image source: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 KayVee.INC