So it has been a while since I wrote a blog piece that wasn’t more representative of the mush my mind is in at this time of year than a thoughtful piece on access management. So this is me attempting to tip the balance. Bear with me if it comes out as dribble!
Inspired by some tweets by @m1ke_ellis, I got to thinking about how much a system needs to know about me to make that system effective. The case in discussion was a Virtual Learning Environment – does this need to know that I am a mother, JISCite, author, bad karaoke singer (to plagiarise @m1ke_ellis!) to be able to engage with me effectively?
I have always had a problem with the term VLE as I think very few can be regarded as real learning environments in the pedagogical sense. I think the US term Learning Management System (LMS) is probably more accurate – something that performs a role as the administrative interface to my learning. Thus I need to feed it information that it needs to administrate (address, e-mail, course, preferences) not information about who I am and how I learn. That is the context of this environment.
So, to Carrie Bradshaw the moment, is this all about persona – or personality?
I have often used the term persona on this blog to represent what is often called having ‘multiple identities’. We all have multiple personas to help us interact online in different contexts. I chose to present myself differently within these contexts, so some may include a link to my work blog, others details about my musical preferences etc. etc.
Personality is something slightly different and more elusive, but is the thing that makes me who I am. In a pedagogical environment, this might traditionally be described as my learner type and many systems have attempted to frame themselves differently to recognise the importance of learner type. However, as our identity interactions online become more sophisticated, we need to look at a more specific way of framing this nuance.
A lot of how we are represented and interact online is about what is gleaned from conversations we are having online, and how we are linked to groups and other individuals. Someone is likely to decide to follow on Twitter based on:
- Keywords from my conversations / statements.
- People I follow.
- People who follow me.
So if attributes about me define my persona, what defines my personality? I think it is a mix of:
- Attributes / Persona.
- Environment Context.
- Relationships.
There have obviously been some development in all of these fields, but a formalised approach to the relationships part of personality is still to emerge. Friend of a Friend is an interesting but minimal impact approach, and there have been other tools such as PeopleAggregator and many different ways of ranking and rating the outputs of individuals.
It may not be possible to create a tool to capture this difficult area of our online identity, and of course communities tend to be very self selecting and resistant of categorisation. However I still think it is an interesting part of our personalities in online interactions that is to be further explored.
