Fin de la nuit

I just posted a Bb message about Twitter hashtags to our ELSS tutors. Very kindly they have given their personal tags, although there is also a course tag. In my teaching, I'll probably ask students used a course tag, so that it's easy to locate the contributions. There's also the issue of separate private and professional identity. But then how many tags would I personally need? I can think of two already, just for courses. Best not have one for modules, or I'll be juggling even more virtual id's. And I haven't yet started to use Twitter in earnest...

The first week on the ELLS has come to an end, and a requirement is to reflect on learning on this part of the course. This is a great idea, not just to reinforce learning, but also to track what needs to be done or thought about when starting the social media journey. The technical part of it was trivial, which is a mixed blessing. The ease of setting up various facilities (this blog, Flickr and Twitter, and before this, delicious and LinkedIn) obscures the bigger issues of identity and privacy (I haven’t hit copyright yet, but no doubt this will come). The Mason and Rennie book has a lengthy quote from Lou on page 57. This sparked off a number of ideas partly about my reluctance to use Flickr, but most importantly in terms of understanding the reluctance that some students might have in using social media. My reluctance to use Flickr are showing my visual work has several reasons. Because I am new to Flickr I see it as amorphous, or as I said elsewhere, as a kind of uncurated exhibit...

The Oxford Broookes course has a task involving checking out what Google comes up with when typing your name, to find out what our online public profiles are like. This was an interesting exercise, just because it gathered so many fragments. I found the usual and predictable things: university staff page, university research page (out of date!), conference slides, conference programmes, abstracts for some journal articles, a couple of full articles, and references to book chapters. My LinkedIn profile came up too, and so did the MySpace profile that I barely use. I also found my AREC profile which I'd forgot about. Embarassingly, the 'prolific contributor' messages re-surfaced :-( This was when I was on holiday and set up an automatic message to indicate this. This message ended up recurring over and over again in a discussion group I belonged to. I have never used this 'on holiday' facility again! Annoyingly, it would seem that my details got picked up by Zoominfo ...

Following my own trend of thought, I inadvertently completed one of Week 1 task - the selection of a photograph to express my identity. I could have chosen Flickr, but I can't say I like this social software. Nothing wrong with it, and it is possible to add commentary, but I just don't respond to the lack of context. Flickr makes me think of an uncurated exhibition where images/artefacts are just displayed without some kind of thread. Fine for end-of-degree student shows (though even here, 'end-of-year' is the thread). All this to say that I'd rather have my pictures embedded here in my blog, where I can give them an 'inflection'. I can also kid myself that they are likely to be less public. I like the idea of using images as part of a self-introduction - something to adopt in my own practice as a tutor :-). Using a picture that is not one of oneself is also an interesting idea. It has to be something with some kind of meaning, and as the meaning is not nece...