A Sociocultural Perspective on Negotiating Digital Identities in a Community of Learners

Three dimensional virtual world environments are becoming an increasingly regular feature of the education landscape, providing the opportunity for richly graphical augmented and immersive learning activities. Those who participate in these experiences must mediate through an avatar, negotiating and managing the complexities of this new variation of digital identity alongside their more familiar identity as learner and/or teacher/facilitator. This chapter describes some key moments in the construction of digital identities as a lecturer and a student in the Open University’s community in Second LifeTM. The authors explore experiences in relation to the impact of trust and consistency from a sociocultural perspective, privileging the role of social interaction and context where meaning is socially produced and situationally interpreted, concluding that social interaction is pivotal to any meaningful identity development that takes place. The chapter ends with thoughts for future issues surrounding digital identity in relation to lifelong learning.

Managing Social Reputation in Twitter

Online communities, like Twitter, attract thousands of users worldwide spending hours communicating with others via the Internet. Most platforms offer mechanisms that show the ‘rank’ or ‘social reputation’ users have gained within the social community the platform establishes. This chapter analyses the motivation of users to engage intensively from a social psychological perspective and follows the hypotheses that these status information function as a highly effective reward mechanism. The chapter describes the results of a survey that has been conducted with users of Twitter in order to find out how important it is for users to gain ‘followers’. The chapter outlines a theoretical construct that explains why users try to gain social reputation in different virtual worlds. For this, a typology of virtual worlds has been developed based on possible spill-over effects of social reputation that can be gained in virtual and real worlds.

Hybrid Representation

This chapter discusses the design of embodied pedagogical interface agents. The ultimate aim of the discussion is to suggest categorical or thematic design guidelines for pedagogical agents. The intent of the guidelines is to encourage multimedia designers to go beyond the current “one size fits all” mentality and encompass issues of race and gender in a way that provides meaningful learning experiences for a greater number of persons. The discussion will consider 43 participants’ self-construction of embodied pedagogical interface agents to identify issues of race, gender, and other design characteristics. Grounded theory methodology was employed to provide additional insight into the design and creation of each participant’s pedagogical interface agent. Four agent designs are included as appendices for reference.

Higher Education Institutions and Digital Identity

This chapter addresses the concepts of social software, digital identity, learning, and education and how they feed into SAPO Campus, an institutionally supported Personal Learning Environment that provides its users with a high level of freedom in the use of Web 2.0 services. Depicted as a social media platform for Higher Education, the SAPO Campus project is described in its various facets, services, and relationships with other entities, making a case for user-generated content production and aggregation for use in Higher Education. It also debates the ever increasing demand for the inception of institutional tools that are especially designed to support the construction of the digital identities of its members, letting go of the stubborn molding features offered centrally – disregarding its user’s presence in communities and/or services that are outside its influence – but that still are at the core of each and every academia member’s digital life.

Situated E-Learning

E-learning can free us from bound concepts of who we are. However, our digital identities relate back to varied real world situations within which we live. Situated implications of identity changes are frequently not understood by e-learning systems. This chapter provides a detailed review of situated learning concepts and identity reformation accounts within five case-study situations (i.e. within healthcare, prisons, developing worlds, field based, and virtual worlds) with varied e-learning technologies (i.e. Web2, virtual learning environments, mobile, tabletops1, and virtual worlds). Issues of situated identity, practices, and the impact on real world contexts are reviewed. Findings identify that e-learning systems must be designed to support variations in situations, student awareness, and reflection around implications of identity reformation. A theory and practice approach supports understanding e-learning impacts and future dilemmas. The chapter also provides a review on issues of support and coping mechanisms for impacts from situated learning identity changes.

The Web of Identity

This chapter examines how learners develop a sense of self and belonging in networked learning environments. The authors propose that individuals create and negotiate their identities through an iterative process of dialogic and symbolic exchange with other individuals. The process is always in flux as individuals constantly readjust their understanding and actions within a given context. Individuals strive to reach comfortable levels of cognitive resonance in which they integrate experiences and beliefs of the external world into their personal narratives. To explain this process, the authors provide the Web of Identity (WoI) model. Based on the work of Goffman (1959) and Foucault (1988), this model is composed of five dramaturgical strategies: technology, power, social structure, cultural, and personal agency. These strategies both guide and enable the enactment of behaviour. For researchers, exploring identity and affiliation through the WoI lens raises a series of thought-provoking questions worthy of further investigation.

Identity of Virtual Supporters

The main purpose of this study is to develop a framework for understanding and analyzing digital media as an autonomous social space or structure in which to construct an identity. This chapter extends debate on the impact of developing an online identity by focusing on football supporters, a specific and prevalent community within Turkish society. The authors examine issues surrounding online identity and the impact of digital culture on football supporters through questionnaires conducted with members of fan-based web sites, football forums, and football blogs in Turkey. In the research, the authors focus on the digital identity of fans from the three major clubs of Turkey - Besiktas, Fenerbahce, and Galatasaray. The independent football fan communities of Carsi, UltrAslan, and Gencfb are also present in the digital environment in the form of the official websites of these fan communities at www.forzabesiktas.com, www.ultraslan.com, and www.gencfb.org. The three main websites also include different forums and blogs. This research examines the impact of digital media and distributed social spaces of these clubs’ supporters on contemporary understandings of their digital identity. The authors give the conceptual frameworks and approaches to understanding digital identity of football fans. In this context, authenticity, fanaticism, reputation, belonging, and defending identity are examined to understand individual, group, community, and network based digital identities. From a theoretical perspective, the chapter also tries to understand what it means to be a part of a community using digital media.

Digital Death

Within this chapter, the authors consider the emergence of new cultures and practices surrounding death and identity in the digital world. This includes a range of theory-based discussions, considering how we remember and document the absence of information and how communities and individuals deal with the virtual identities of their loved ones after death. This highlights the evolvement of digital practices in relation to public grief and the building of public (communal) identity, including the impact of digital recording and sharing of ones identity(s). Furthermore, the chapter stresses the relevance of the mediation of memory, discussing how mediation impacts one’s own identity and the communal cultural identity of society at large. Finally, the chapter concludes by considering what role personal choice plays in the way we deal with digital data, and more widely, our digital selves after death.

Digital Identity Built on a Cooperative Relationship

Digital identity may be classified as weak or strong. The weak digital identity is limited to virtual characters, avatars, or fakes, which play digital roles with no significant impact on the subjects’ lives. The strong digital identity is constructed when subjects use digital technologies as a support to convey meanings that extend into the subjects’ lives, and reach beyond a virtual concept. The cooperative relationship within a Virtual Environment may be an important method to build a strong digital identity. When the parties involved are genuinely interested, the cooperative relationship may lead to joint constructions of meanings and changes in the sociocultural context. In this chapter, the authors examine the conditions under which cooperative relationships may contribute to the construction of a strong digital identity in digitally excluded subjects. To this end, they present practices in the TelEduc Virtual Environment conducted together with community health agents, who used to be excluded from the information technology universe. The chapter discusses elements that may encourage the construction of a strong digital identity and how the process, which the authors refer to as spiral of transformation, reaches beyond the virtual environment.

Posthuman Literacies?

Social media and mobile technologies have introduced new means of networking, particularly in affluent post-industrial societies. However, the centrality of communication to these technologies is not always acknowledged. Drawing on the perspective of New Literacy Studies (e.g. Barton 2001), this chapter examines digital media from the point of view of meaning making, discussing the complex ways in which multimodal semiotic resources are used in creating and maintaining digital identities. It argues that the use of these resources engages the subject in hybridity across digital, analogue, and embodied practice. The notion of “posthuman literacies” is proposed, drawing on Haraway’s notion of the cyborg (1991) and Hayles’ examinations of the posthuman (1999, 2006), examining meaning making in a context where the boundaries between analogue and digital, “human” and “machine” are disrupted, blurred, and ideologically freighted. It concludes with a discussion of how this analysis might apply to the context of higher education.