Social Media, Networked Learning & Digital Identity

I chose to watch the archived lecture on Social Media, Networked Learning & Digital Identity from Oct. 18, 2011. I chose this particular lecture because my digital identity is something I have become more and more concerned about. Like many people in my generation, I jumped straight on the Myspace.com bandwagon (7 or more years ago now?). Like many college students, for me it was exciting tool to share with the world just how much you were drinking. As adulthood and responsibility loom ever-closer on my horizon, I am more and more aware and cautious of my digital face.

Dr. Alec Couros openned his lecture with a quote that I believe will stick with me for a good, long while: “Google is the new business card”.  As you can imagine, this represents the truth of the times that anything can (and will) be Googled.   

I expected the lecture to be a cautionary of tool warning its observers to cover their digital backs, so to speak. I was wrong. Instead Dr. Couros shared his passion for sharing. A buzzword of the lecture was “openness”. Which I think is exemplified by the following quote from the William and Floretta Hewlett Foundation:

“Open Education is the simple and powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the World Wide Web in particular provide and extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse knowledge.”

In short, knowledge should be free! Couros says our society “commodified” knowledge. Knowledge was protected but has become liberated by the openness of the web.

University education, until the very recent past has represented a form of “commodified” knowledge. You must be a paying student to receive the knowledge. These days, MIT and Stanford are opening up this knowledge. Aside from knowledge, Dr. Couros broke down the reason people attend universities into 4 categories: content, degrees, social life, support. He then layered all of the websites that are filling these needs today (from Yahoo! Answers for support, Wikipedia for content, to Twitter for social life). Degrees, he says, are the last things holding us to universities. And he predicts there will be a way around this in the near future as well. An interesting thought.

Additionally, he talked about “The Barbra Streisand Effect” which basically cautions that the more you try to suppress something, the more it comes out. Again the message: open, open, open.

In the end, Dr. Couros did touch on some cautionary tales of oversharing personally hurting people professionally (he mentioned a Georgian teacher who was suspended for having a photo of herself with beer and wine on a European vacation). His advice for combating this issue can best be summed up by a quote shared from Seth Godin “Everything you do now ends up in your permanent record. The best plan is to overload Google with a long tail of good stuff.” I seem to remember this very advice coming from a certain EDUC 578 professor earlier this semester ;).

I’d like to end this blog with advice from Dr. Couros that weaves together everything I have been learning this semester. He said we have to overcome the inner 2-year-old in you that screams “mine, mine, mine!” If you have read my prior blog posts, you would see that this has been a personal goal I set for myself this semester. Thanks to a former teacher who flipped my world upside down by saying that your value comes not from the knowledge you keep but the knowledge you share, I have made it my goal to fight the screaming toddler in me that wants to own my ideas. This is why I am in the process of creating Christina's Creative Writing Cookbook. In hopes that I can share back just a bit of what the society has shared with me through the web.