Katie Jo Black
Assistant Professor of Economics
Digital Pedagogy, Identity, Networks, and Scholarship – Week 1
DigPINS – Managing your professional digital identity
As a person who grew up at the same time the internet did, I would expect myself to be more digitally active than I am currently. (I’ll save you the estimation and math…. I’m 32) I chose in undergrad to use Facebook as my frequent digital platform and found many of my friends doing the same thing. It was really fun to post albums, tag friends, make titles for pictures, keep in touch over summer break, and reconnect with old friends. Then we entered our senior year of college. Job search, interviews, background checks. Many of my friends shut down, removed, locked, etc their digital profiles because of job prospects. I didn’t remove Facebook, but I did set my profile to strictly private. I hear about all the internet trolls and various other “not so kind” entities. Even recent stories from friends and coworkers have swirled around me. I took all of these responses and anecdotes to heart, and I have developed what I refer to as a healthy respect for digital profiles.
An opportunity was provided at Kenyon College to receive some guidance regarding professional digital identities.
I believe this course will be very helpful in getting my professional identity up and running as well as efficient; since I don’t need to remake the wheel because someone else already has the information. Our first week is focusing on our digital identity and how we use technology. We have watched a couple videos about “visitors vs residents” by David White (video here) and I’ve found this articulates my feelings about the relationship between technology and learning very well. I don’t believe that my grandfather “can’t learn” the internet, he just hasn’t spent enough time there to make himself into a resident of email or Google search.
We have been challenged to make our own “visitors vs residents” map to evaluate our status in the digital world. Mine is below, and my personal goal is that some of these boxes will move by the end of this course and even farther by the end of this summer.
What do you notice? Here are the pieces that I’m reflecting on:
- I’m not much of a resident anywhere… yet.
- Most of my digital identity is very dichotimous, either its personal or professional, not both.
- I’m happy with my Facebook status NOT being residential. (wait, what?)
- I have a lot of digital pieces in my professional areas, but the pieces in my personal quadrant are pretty large in terms of on-line time proportion.
My goals for the end of this summer would be:
- Move my website, blog, and twitter boxes to the right. If I become more residential that also means more efficient! More efficient means I don’t have to spend hours and hours on a single digital project.
- Stretch my blog box towards personal. Not that I feel my blogging is going to be in high demand, but I do believe that I have an interesting perspective on balancing professional, family, and fitness lives.
- Make the Facebook box smaller.
- Be consistent with my digital profiles and attempt to have them synchronized. Dr. Elaine Young has a really interesting class (Professional Digital Identity) for students, but with a nice article that gives 5 concise bullet points about the first steps to creating a digital identity. This article can speak well to faculty also.
Katie Jo Black 