Social scholars: Educators’ digital identity construction in open, online learning environments
- Type
- Journal article
- Venue
- Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice
- Year
- 2015
- Topics
- digital-identity · digital-literacy · community
Citation
Wise, Julie B; O’Byrne, W Ian. (2015). Social scholars: Educators’ digital identity construction in open, online learning environments. Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice.
Abstract
The #WalkMyWorld project was an open, social media experiment developed to provide preservice and in-service teachers and K–12 students with an opportunity to focus on developing media literacies and civic engagement in online spaces. The study employed a basic interpretative qualitative study approach to examine how online social environments can be used as a vehicle to engage educators in the creation and sharing of online content, as it relates to multimodal meaning making, social scholarship, and identity construction. For this study, identity construction was identified as visually representing an aspect of an individual’s life using any preferred medium, and sharing it through Twitter using the #WalkMyWorld hashtag. Results suggest three different categories in which participants viewed the activity of identity construction: (a) embraced similar identities, (b) established separate identities, or (c) resisted creating an online identity. As educators engage students with reading and writing digital content within social and connected learning environments, it is important to consider the creation and curation of an individual’s digital identity in social scholarship practices.
Notes
The #WalkMyWorld data kept surfacing a tension I found genuinely interesting: educators who were perfectly comfortable with digital tools in professional contexts — email, LMS, presentation software — but deeply uncomfortable with the idea of sharing their personal or creative life online. The project asked them to photograph their world, share it publicly under their own name, and respond to each other’s images. For some, that was energizing. For others, it felt like a violation.
The three-category finding (embraced, established separate, resisted) maps onto something real about how people navigate public digital presence. The “separate identities” category was the most interesting to me: educators who engaged genuinely with the project but maintained a clear boundary between their “professional educator” identity online and whatever other identities they held. That’s not resistance — it’s a legitimate strategy, especially for educators who face scrutiny from employers or communities about what they share online.
This paper also introduced me to social scholarship as a frame, and it’s stuck. The idea that academic knowledge production can happen in open, networked, informal spaces — not just in journals behind paywalls — is something I’ve been working with ever since.
📄 Full Text
![[Social_Scholars_Educators_Digital_Identi.pdf]]
Connected Concepts
- [[Digital Literacy]]
- [[Teaching Philosophy]]