Niki’s Journal - Engaging learning with social software June 09

This is my course journal for the short course I'm undertaking at Oxford Brookes University: Engaging Learning with Social Software.

Activity 1A Check your current online public profile

My online presence

A Google search for Niki Fardouly reveals 94 entries. Current professional profile appears at the top of the list.

Subsequently I spent a long time tightening privacy settings on Facebook after reading my course notes about online privacy. I never did like the public exposure this tool promotes and I only use it in the most minimal way. Like Twitter I can see the benefits it has in connecting people but the potential for misuse is too great. I really don’t want to know about the intimate details of everyone’s daily activities. I already have information overload with emails, blogs, wikis, web sites and the myriad of things I’d like to read for personal or professional reasons without adding to that the minutiae of what everyone else is currently thinking or doing.

The persistence of online information

http://web.archive.org/web/20001120004600/http://www.fbe.unsw.edu.au/Learning/instructionaldesign/styles.htm

http://web.archive.org/web/20010413091318/www.fbe.unsw.edu.au/Learning/instructionaldesign/

Shock! Horror! Instructional design notes I published online back in 1998 appear in an online archive. I had the web site taken down many years ago but others have taken copies of the entire thing and archived it online so it’s still accessible. At least the reviews are excellent J and the work is referenced from many other sites. Unfortunately the ideas are ascribed to me when in reality what I had done was produce a ‘reader’s digest’ version of a number of books for the FBE academics who had no time or interest in reading the books for themselves. So the referencing is not entirely correct and perpetuates a myth about me as an expert/authority on adult learning. This shows how inaccurate online information can be. Like Chinese whispers the false information takes on a life of its own.

It also confirms that anything you put online remains forever and can’t be erased because you lose control over your own content. This is a worry because you can never hide from your past. Things you said or did in the distant past will still define (or haunt) you in the present. You can always update a CV and remove irrelevant entries but if others can find your outdated work splashed across the internet there is nowhere to hide.

Identity and Privacy

“But before undertaking online activities in the more public online social spaces we need to consider how much personal information we are prepared to disclose, whether we want to use pseudonyms as screen names, to what extent we want to be identifiable by photograph, geographical location and/or occupation etc.”

This is a growing problem because I need a “professional” presence online but I also want to use my real picture and name for my online socialising. However in Facebook I have a mixed audience of personal, professional and learning (course) contacts. Even within the professional group I don’t mind some of them viewing my personal life, but not others.

I don’t like fake identities and profiles that don’t reveal the person e.g. fake photos or no photos. I want to know who I’m dealing with. It feels deceptive to use an avatar.