Identity Crisis

Following on from my unexpectedly on-topic blog about whether or not I should have blogged some (now probably fairly inconsequential) ideas that I had, I have been having an identity crisis today. The very helpful replies got me thinking a lot about identity, and about taking more proactive decisions about how I want my identity to be portrayed on the web. Due to the fact that I have predominantly become involved in web2 style activities such as blogging, tweeting (finally!) and even more ‘social’ sites like Facebook through my job, it is inevitable that my identity online is very much wrapped up in who I am as an employee. This in itself has traits of who I am as an individual (nobody would do my job if they didn’t like it!) but I think I need to put more thought in to other areas of how I portray my identity online that are not perhaps so firmly tied to my job role and better reflect the multiple personas I hold. Action the first.

The only online instance of myself that is not in anyway connected to my known, primarily work-related, online persona is a poetry blog I write completely anonymously. I challenge any of you to find that

The second action is for me to develop the About page on this blog to more clearly express what we are trying to achieve and communicate through this blog. Very good advice – thanks all. I will be doing that in coordination with my co-blogging conspirator Mark and it will be interesting to see if our views on why we blog differ. Mark, you can’t just say because Nicole makes me!

The whole identity crisis did give me space to think about the use and portrayal of identity online in other areas of JISC work. A useful tweet from David Kernohan gave me some time thinking about the Open Educational Resource movement and its links to identity and access management. It is at the other end of the sphere from closed published resources where we probably will always need institutionally managed (or perhaps brokered) access management. OER impacts on the importance of linking the individual author identity to resources, user management of their identity in relation to that resource, whether it is important to the author to maintain that link as part of his online history, and ongoing curation not only of the resource but identity metadata around the resource and its additional authors through reuse and repurpose.

I then went on to speak to the Content team more broadly about my identity crisis and the future of identity management in relation to the topics that will be covered at the upcoming JISC Content Conference (still to be announced I think).

Finally, a tweet from Josie Fraser alerted me to an interesting piece on gender for the semantic web. Are we teaching the web to be male, and thus giving it a complete identity crisis?? Something I will have to discuss with Mel, our assistant outreach coordinator for access management, who as part of her non-JISC persona has a student persona studying for a BA in anthropology with a specific interest in gender issues.