Category Archives: education

Further thoughts on Identity

Posted on by
10
Facebook Twitter Email

Online interaction is something I’ve been doing for a number of years, and so it is really interesting to read about what theorists have to say about it. Guy Merchant of Sheffield Hallam University writes that a lot of adult interaction online contains an element of ‘identity performance’. As an alternative to face-to-face communication, it is certainly arguable that our online personas need to be more “us” to compensate for the fact that we are communicating through writing rather than through talking, using facial expressions and body language. Humans take in something like 80% of the information in their lives through the eyes, so losing that visual communication must require some other stimulus when communicating online.

Gee argues that we live in an age of ‘new capitalism’ and so our identities evolve as new communicative tools are launched, and we become more focused on our likes and habits instead of old dividing lines like age, class and gender. In my last post on identity I wrote that I identified myself in the past as an ‘indie kid’ and so would quite happily judge someone for being a great Justin Bieber fan, while I indulge in the music of Chromatics, Modeselektor, Iamamiwhoami and Patrick Wolf. Likewise, others will mock me for listening to Modeselektor who have been called the jokers of the Berlin scene.

Merchant writes of the concern that online identities have been seen as inherently untrustworthy – concerns parodied brilliantly in the Brass Eye paedophile special.

Gaming comes up a lot in theories surrounding online identity; but this is an area I have no experience of, having never played online games and having no desire to ever do so. Aware as I am of the possibilities of creating characters online, it is not something I have ever done with intent, aside from the characters I have created in my comedy writing. However, the argument about identity performance widens as other theorists argue that we interweave our real lives with embellishments as a person’s online biography cannot be completely false.

Davies and Merchant carried out a study on blogging and wrote the following:

I have an ongoing story. But I think we have several ongoing stories. I also think that if   we bear in mind a particular audience, we change our story to suit them and thus change our notion of who we are according to our audience.

This quote really interests me as there are certain things a blogger will do when publishing an entry on their website, such as filling in keywords and an abstract for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and tagging collections of words to help define the article. To attract traffic to the site, the blogger may then put out messages informing people on social networks such as Facebook or Twitter of the new blog post. The keywords and SEO data will seek to bring in a certain type of audience who would be interested in the work, so there will always be a general sense of direction in the blog; a blog post on the best cheap restaurants in London wouldn’t be targeted at those who frequent Gordon Ramsay restaurants for example.

This is life in Norway...

My friend, who runs the http://www.lifeinnorway.net/ website is very talented at defining an audience but is currently having to work out the audience for another idea that broadens the Life in Norway concept. His homepage includes links to Twitter, an RSS feed and Facebook. The Facebook page has 125 fans and the bottom of the webpage has many keywords on what he writes about, all of this seeks to connect a certain internet-savvy audience who is an ex-pat living in Norway or is interested in Norway. I would question whether this site gets a lot of native Norwegians visiting as they already live in Norway and wouldn’t really need the knowledge of a British guy living in Oslo.

My website has recently undergone some changes as a result of the Internet Cultures module at university and these are changes discussed by Davies and Merchant in their blogging study:

In addition to this, many bloggers use the sidebar to provide additional information which helps to locate them in specific social networks. Blogrolls and favourite web-links are quite explicit ways of showing one’s affiliations… and links to photosharing sites (such as Flickr photostreams) all provide opportunities to showcase anchored and transient identities.

Recent additions to my site include the Flickr sidebar and a Twitter feed in the sidebar; this means that all my online-sharing activities are brought together through my website so that writing, photography and Tweeting are all connected and accessible from one place. I have condensed my online personality to one site on purpose and I give the illusion of sharing a lot but I maintain a lot of privacy on Facebook and never publish anything overtly personal; I certainly don’t release data that I feel would compromise me or anyone else. Despite me saying this, Merchant believes that more is given away than is realised… ‘I am confident that a richer sense of identity may well be communicated at a deeper level, in ways that lie beneath the conscious control of the author.’

Online data sharing, in whatever form, is an opportunity to ‘author the self’ says Holland, and I believe that to be true. We all want to be seen in a positive light, so it makes sense that our online identities would strive to achieve that aim. Now, I am off to listen to some music you’ll never have heard of, and perhaps I’ll read some of the work of Karl Marx before watching a challenging foreign film.*

*Hmm, reality is I’m listening to Metronomy, Goldfrapp and Bon Iver, I can’t be bothered with reading any Marx on a Sunday and I’m dead excited about watching the final Harry Potter film again later.

Identity – who am I really?

Posted on by
5
Facebook Twitter Email

Who I am varies depending on who I am with. That’s not to say there’s a dozen alternate Chris’ all doing their own thing, but identity is never entirely about freedom so much as altering who you appear to be to different set of people. An example of this; I wanted to apply as an English teacher at a Catholic Sixth Form in Bristol, but I felt my position as an atheist would be problematic at a religious college, despite their equality and diversity statement on the website. I think it’s more me assuming my identity as an atheist to be a problem but as a side comment the college reports that 87% of the staff is heterosexual, 0% is gay/lesbian and the rest are unknown. Infer from that what you will… but if we are to talk identity, that statistic stuck out. Perhaps 0% is realistic, but I don’t believe that to be the case.

My own sense of identity, linked to the question “why on earth do I indulge in social media and put myself out on the internet” is always bashing with my concept of the 1/3 life crisis which I feel I’ve been going through over the last two years. As a teenager, I had my issues but I always knew I wanted to do ‘A’ levels, then university, and it was inevitable that I’d do teacher training. Throughout my life I’ve always known my own path and I’ve barely deviated from it, making my own choices all the way and somehow ending up where I wanted to get to. Yet this 1/3 life crisis is trickier. I’m grown up now, but I feel unfulfilled and I don’t know what I want.

  • Do I want to travel the world and never settle? 4 years into a relationship suggests I don’t. So why did I apply to a job in the Middle East last week then? It’s nothing to do with being in an unhappy relationship. I fear I suffer incurable wanderlust.
  • Do I want to a cottage in Devon where I can read books and make jam? Of course I do. But I already live in a cottage with lots of space for reading but I find myself wasting time instead.
  • Should I go out to clubs? I can’t be bothered, though.
  • Why do I even care about quantum physics and why do I keep buying books about it? It confuses the hell out of me and I’m not a scientist!
  • Shall I become trendy? Well, I’ve never done that so far so it’d be odd to contrive to be trendy now.

I'm with Labour and I'm not afraid to show it!

The David Buckingham article I read for university this week was all about identity, and a great quote came up about adolescents being ‘incomplete’. If I ever felt incomplete as a teenager, it’s never gone away. If Stern thinks making blogs and websites is all about self-reflection, then I’ve been doing that for over ten years. I love being able to trace back my thoughts to earlier times. I was a lot more frantic ten years ago, my writing was frankly a ton of ideas that sometimes formed itself into a cohesive whole (The Comic Sans Appreciation Society, Sister Bendy Wendy and my advent calendar, Patron Saint Porn Stars) but often it was a bizarre selection of words.

The article had an argument about identifying with our class background. Well, I’m an oddity there because my parents and entire family are working class yet I was bought up in the military which allowed me to skip my destiny as a working-class kid from Birmingham. I can’t even identity myself as a Brummie, let along working class. It’s as if I don’t even exist sometimes. Where do I come from? I don’t know. The best sub-section I could ever associate myself with was the vague notion of the Indie Kids. Yes, if something becomes popular, it’s suddenly toxic and must be avoided and mocked.

Goffman talks about ‘impression management’ and putting on a performance when you are with people. I know this all too well and it’s funny to read about this after I was told twice in a week that I should seek out a niche as a stand-up comedian. That idea horrifies me, yet at the same time I’m well aware I can make people laugh quite effortlessly, and I actually get wound up if I can’t make someone laugh. No doubt about it, I want to make a good impression and my neuroses are such that I spend a lot of time reflecting on my personality and consider how I can get rid of the bits of it I dislike. It’s impossible and exhausting at times.

Similarly intriguing is what Faucault wrote about power, that we need to regulate ourselves and be encouraged to exist within the norms. For teachers who are online, this means we need to not look drunk all the time on Facebook; for MPs, it’s to try and not say anything remotely controversial unless you’re a professional buffoon like Boris Johnson. We are reminded that our data is monitored, that companies can find out what we post online. It can all be held against us in the future and, oh look, suddenly our lives have become a mixture of 1984 and Kafka’s The Trial. Saying this, life doesn’t feel like 1984 because we are essentially free, even if freedom means most major companies know all they need to about me to and much more. I’ve often dreamt of falling under the radar, but have become too obsessed with collecting points on my array of loyalty cards to ever do it.

Thou shalt not allow recruiters to ever see you drinking, even if just one pint costing £6 in Sweden.

dana boyd wrote that youths can ‘write themselves into being’ on social media sites and it’s scary because it’s something I’ve seen. I know of people who have multiple Facebook accounts to deal with their ‘other’ sides…piece together the jigsaw and you just have a person suffering from low confidence trying to invent themselves anew. Social media allows us to re-invent ourselves, but I believe the truth will out in the end. It is interesting to read that there is an argument that we are encouraged to identity with the consumer culture on social media. Facebook is always littered with people’s likes and fan pages exist for everything, Twitter had paid-ads that appear as promoted tweets, gaining many views. Even in our own social media bubble, we give more of ourselves away to content-producers, yet few people question it or change their social media habits because the identity we have created online gives us a certain social capital that we want to cash in on.

I have written previously of my concerns about the way technology is used in education and I’d add to my concerns that I sometimes feel the obsession with the “information superhighway”, “information society” or the “knowledge economy” is just fluff. Or as Jack Dee put it, it’s not a highway, you’re typing on a keyboard in your bedroom.

The internet is of course enormous and bigger than us and therein lies the problem. Students often don’t know how to actually search for anything online, grabbing at the first random webpage that comes up, copying stuff and forgetting about it. It becomes a reflex and nothing is gained of value. So, a knowledge economy and an information society needs to know what to do with this wonderful knowledge but I’d wager that people just store things and do nothing with it. However, could I have successfully planned a ten day trip to Cuba without the internet? I could, using guidebooks, but I’d be a slave to someone else’s opinion of what makes a good bar. The internet has given me a number of viewpoints to work from, so I know where the best beaches really are, and I know how to get the best mojito’s.

This is the identity you want online; studious yet casual.

From my experience, when people make arguments that young people, or digital natives if you will are wildly creative, obsessed with finding out information and making full use of the possibilities of the information available to them, I can’t help but snort with derision. Don Tapscott argues that for young people, “using the new technology is as natural as breathing.” The problem with this analysis is that breathing is as natural as breathing, but just as singers needs good breath control, people need good skills in collecting and interpreting data. These skills don’t just turn up and work with digital natives, they are earned and not everyone can hope to earn them.

There are those who can manipulate the infinite information available out there and make good use of it, and there are those who can competently handle a computer and make good use of social media, but I think as we get more integrated in these social networks, we lose a little more of our privacy and of ourselves. In the end, our identity may just become a mask, a list of likes and dislikes and a Spotify playlist.

What I know of myself, of my own identity is that I am an incurable knowledge-seeker, that I want to stand out from the crowd but not have to appear as an outsider, that I want to show myself online as fun but serious about a variety of issues. Sometimes the identity falls apart but at the core it’s always the same. We just have to try and not lose who we are as the information society develops.

‘Shame’ film review

Posted on by
4
Facebook Twitter Email

The Fass'

One of the properties of film I most admire is the existence of a character that I can care about for a couple of hours and share an emotional resonance with. This isn’t something that happens very often, but when it does, the film can live with you for years. Ralph Fienne’s peerless performance in The Constant Gardener springs to mind. The scene where he is told bad news about his wife while watering his plants is beautiful because of Fienne’s manner, and the knowledge that we know something he doesn’t makes this scene intimately touching. Fienne’s response to the news is simply heartbreaking. Similarly, Tilda Swinton’s performance in We Need to Talk about Kevin is remarkable for the way she carries herself. If she spots a glimmer of hope in her endlessly awful life, she breaks out into a smile and the screen comes alive with her charisma.

So many films aim to shock us, or astonish us with special effects, that it can often be dispiriting to be left feeling cold and distant from the film. Shame, starring the ubiquitous Michael Fassbender as Brandon and near-ubiquitous Carey Mulligan as Sissy and directed by Steve McQueen is an oddly antiseptic film. Of course, a film about sex addiction and an utterly dysfunctional relationship is never going to be a laugh-out-loud comedy, but Brandon is so enigmatic that by the film’s end I felt I had learned nothing about him. I felt that he had learned too little about himself.

Fassbender effortlessly bases his performance as a man who is dead inside, and goes through the motions of his life which McQueen shoots with great effect as Brandon wakes, plays his voicemails while in the shower, goes to work, self-pleasures in the toilet cubicle finds a woman or views porn for the evening. Again and again, the same pattern repeats itself. Rarely has addiction seemed so vapid and sad, so in this aspect the film succeeds in painting a bleak picture.

The film is bathed in the greys of the unforgiving New York Subway and the energy-sapping low-lighting in the office where Brandon works, producing a muted palette that sometimes looks beautiful but mostly looks quite uninspiring. Despite this, the scenes where Brandon is having fun and enjoying himself show a different side to the film which McQueen might have been wise to have used more of. When Brandon has a date with co-worker Marianne, a genuinely engaging dinner date follows with a hopeless waiter and something of an exploration into Brandon’s feelings of intimacy. He realises how lewd and lonely his life has become and after the date indulges in some spontaneous “spring cleaning” of his porn apparel. Ultimately, the intimacy never works and he spins out of control, mirroring the descent of his sister, Sissy.

Carey Mulligan is such a 'Sissy'

Carey Mulligan plays the part brilliantly and sequences where you don’t know what the odd brother and sister duo will end up doing next impress. The relationship is confusing, sexuality is blurred and history clearly plays on their minds. Sadly, this relationship is still unsatisfying and my impression is that McQueen invested in the characters but decided to omit some details. Perhaps some find this fascinating, perhaps this is a genuinely intellectual approach to film-making, but for me, it seemed vague and half-formed too often.

The curse of the computer room

Posted on by
7
Facebook Twitter Email

Integrating technology in the classroom may be a solution but it is also the problem.

A few days ago, I was in a classroom supporting a group. Nothing was actually happening as the teacher was dithering about some activity. I took the opportunity to write some thoughts I have been having about how technology is used in the classroom, how it can be a disaster if not structured and how the fundamental idea behind the computer room is flawed.

There is a real risk of having a disastrous lesson in a computer room. I know this for myself after one memorable observation when I had planned lots of activities for the students to do, yet one student still saw fit to try and sell some DVDs to a classmate opposite. In other lessons in the computer rooms, it became a real problem trying to prise students away from the screen. There have been situations where students become really angry if they are badgered to get off the computer and it has led me to worry about how much time the education system devotes to having students simply sit in front of a screen. Many students spend a lot of time welded to their phones, and of course at home there’s the screen-based activities of the internet, the TV and games consoles.

Having observed many lessons, I have sat with a sort of rising dread as another worksheet gets handed out for the students to carry out. The task is a means to an end, an opportunity to extract something from the assessment criteria out of the students. There have been times when no actual learning has taken place because there is a systemic failure to spend time developing life skills the students really need. That failure allows students to build up bad habits, producing work of variable quality and in some cases, turning class work into solitary exercises.

Scary offices

Let’s take research as an example. I commented on twitter on the Wikipedia blackout day that students across the globe would be unable to copy and paste their college work for the day. It was meant in jest, but there is a deeper truth to the way that students are not challenged enough in how they rip off other people’s work and claim it is their own. Even worse is that it often does not cross their mind to realise they are cheating, not learning and wasting precious time.

Research techniques are not embedded enough across the curriculum in colleges, from my experience. Often, students have found the idea of referencing work odd or long-winded and it can be an uphill battle to get the discipline of crediting people where credit’s due.

In my teaching, I have done what I could to stem the flow of Wikipedia entries coming to me dressed as work. It would partially explain my constant look of terror as I approached the marking box. I familiarise myself with key Wikipedia entries and I have made a habit of copying phrases into google to search for the string of words. I would withhold marks for work I was not confident about and I would go as far as finding the source material and stapling it to work with no further comments.

There seems to be an idea that plonking students in front of a screen and getting them to get work done is ok, but it takes a great deal of skills to manage the situation successfully. Time-constrained targets often work well, with feedback at the end of the task. However, the students need to think the work they have been asked to do is worthwhile; consider the distractions available online and then think about the priorities for the students. Will the work be more interesting than an addictive computer game, a facebook chat or youtube videos of keyboard cat in a Hitler parody? Even in the colleges with blocking software, it is inevitable that someone will find a way to get through the filters!

I was once shown software by a library assistant that showed what each student was looking at one the internet in the computer cluster. At the time I was a bit concerned by it, but as time has passed I have become even more averse to this sort of surveillance. It allows the teacher to keep control but that comes at the risk of student autonomy, which I don’t think is a good precedent to set. I would much rather set out expectations with eventual sanctions rather than a system that explicitly shows a lack of trust in the student.

If Kim Jong-Un likes computer rooms, should we abandon them?

I am consciously trying to balance an argument for computer rooms, but my mindset at the moment is that the computer room is all too often a cop out for actual teaching. As someone who probably has some form of Attention Deficit Disorder, I find classes based primarily around computers really boring; and I know how I react to boredom is to lose motivation to do work. I stop seeing the reason for working, and allow distraction to take over unless I am challenged. I fear this is something students can appreciate all too well and ineffective timetabling can mean some students spend a large proportion of their college time in computer rooms.

There are certainly ways to resolve these issues, and I’m sure that many teachers manage computer rooms brilliantly, so this post is more an observation on what I’ve witnessed and my problems with the concept of computer rooms.

 

 

A blog entry wot relates to wot I do at university

Posted on by
Reply
Facebook Twitter Email

I’m sitting in the classroom for a module on the MA I am studying. As we go round the room, people are explaining their ideas for their blog for the Digital Cultures unit; a few are saying their blog will be about campaigning, raising awareness, LOL Cats, serious stuff and so on. What is really surprising is that a fair few have said they don’t really “get” the blogging thing, which is a bit of a mystery to me.

Thinking about it, I think the feeling of not understanding something new is quite a common theme but what I find a shame is when people put up a wall before they try something new. Hopefully all my classmates will see that blogging is what you make of it; you can wax lyrical about pets, write about our innermost feelings or keep your private life private and write about films or music. For those that do blog and love it, they become totally self-centred and anxious to get lots of hits on their blog about the perfect spider chutney/hate that look like toilet bowls, etc.

Maybe it’s a natural human thing to resist new technology, but when I think of it, I realise I blog because I enjoy communicating. It doesn’t matter to me that my communiques go unnoticed because the main interest is in keeping my creativity ticking.

If you’re interested, and I want you to know my recipe for the perfect jam smoothie is on the page I’m linking to, I write here about the history of my blog…which basically goes back to when I was a terribly bored teenager who had lots of stuff bubbling up in my brain as I was finishing off my A levels. At uni most of my creativity was absorbed within my studies, and I really started to write again in 2011 for a number of websites until I started this one up again.

Through the module at uni, Digital Cultures, I intend to explore a number of areas of blogging like making money out of it – looking with an angry eye at SEO blogs that exist JUST to exist and hijack people to websites, the people who write all the time with the most banal lists of what they do every day (mostly cake eating I suspect) and I am going to ban all social media from my life for a week which may kill me.

Anyway, here is a blogger who I’m sure most people know of – http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com