Digital Identity
Jim Groom (2008) threw out an interesting idea yesterday regarding the notion of digital identity and how it relates to student blogs, suggesting that a university might buy each student a one year domain license for a personal URL, rather than forcing student blogs under the umbrella of the institution’s domain. I find this to be a fascinating idea and think it bears a great deal of merit.
Hosting a blog or website within a university domain typically means your URL references the institution - such as myschool.edu/community/people/~jdoe in Groom’s example. This is an institution-centric approach that places the individual beneath the organisation in the hierarchy, and focusses on the role rather than the person. The implications of this impact upon both digital identity and continuity of activity.
Digital Identity
Groom quotes Brad Kozlek as defining a blog as “a tool for students to craft their digital identity with intention.” In my view digital identity revolves largely around the holistic view of the individual - or perhaps more accurately the view that they wish to convey - not simply their role or activities at the institution. Subsuming a student or staff’s web presence within an institution’s domain serves to disproportionately focus on a narrow band of activity, and incorporating mandates, control measures and requirements that would not exist were the blog to stand on its own - at least to the same degree. These include policies concerning the institution’s web presence, codes of conduct, potentially even restrictions on content.
My intent in mentioning the latter, incidentally, is not provide commentary on mandates or requirements, but rather to highlight the notion that in a university domain, a student’s blog is much less their own than when it’s hosted on a personal domain - as such the sense of personal ownership in the former is less than the latter. Individual’s will arguably feel far more empowered in a space that’s located at theirname.net, than myschool.edu/community/people/~jdoe.
Continuity of Activity
Of equal importance is preserving the continuity of activity, and the notion that “[a] digital identity should be an online address one can have no matter where they are, a space where you can track that person as they move not only from being a freshman to a sophomore, but from an undergraduate to a graduate and beyond.” (Groom, 2008)
Particularly in the case of students, individual’s are at an institution for only a limited period of time, after which point they move on to new endeavours. Use of a personal domain enables continuity of activity throughout their journey - wherever they go, their reflections, discussions, and content goes with them. In the context of life-long learning this is particularly important, since the more seamless the continuity, the greater the opportunities for continued engagement and ongoing learning.
This extends in no small way to the development and maintenance of learning networks. Lifelong learning is not simply about preservation of content, but preservation of connections with other learners as well. If digital identity is indeed an extension of personal identify - which I believe it is - it’s critical that learning networks develop around people, rather than the roles they adopt within institutions. That way, when institutional roles no longer exists, the networks remain intact.
In a university-based presence, by contrast, things are more complicated. Often times when a student graduates or otherwise leaves the institution, their access to services and programs ends. Unless functionality is in place to export their blog content, this could mean a complete loss of data. Furthermore even if their data is exported, moving content from one domain to another will result in links to their content breaking.
For example, if Student A contributes a post that Student B finds insightful and references, when Student A’s domain changes, the link in Student B’s blog will no longer work. This represents both a literal and figurative break in the connection between the two students.
To be realistic though, a blog hosted at Blogger or WordPress.com could address the same issues of continuity and to a lesser degree personal ownership. So in that sense it could be considered to be a middle ground which is easier to set-up and requires no financial investment (for either organisations or individuals). The significance, at least in my mind, is in planning for the long term implications of interacting and learning on the web and recognising the fact that schools and institutions are just one aspect of our identity.
References
Groom, Jim (2008). “A domain of one’s own”. 29 November 2008. Accessed 1 December at http://bavatuesdays.com/a-domain-of-ones-own/
