29.1: Introduction

Learning outcomes

• Understand the notion of learners’ identities and how it underpins all online communication.
• Be aware of the issues related to online identities.
• Know how educators can support learners as they establish their identities in the context of online education.

“If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?” – Chuck Palahniuk (1999, p. 33)

The notion that we are who we are is not necessarily true as we move into the online world. Given that educators have a measure of control over, and vested interests in, how they represent themselves online, Lynn Kirkland Harvey’s wide-ranging discussion underlines the fact that learners’ online identities, over which educators exert quite limited control, deserve special consideration. The importance of identity-related issues looms even larger when we embrace the notion that identity is the base from which learners’ engagement with content, as well as communication with others, begins.

In the traditional classroom, a student’s identity is almost completely bound up—physically, kinesthetically, and linguistically—with the individual as he or she enters the classroom. In the online classroom, learners enter with only their words and perhaps selected images and create identities from those. Students may not be conscious of the myriad choices available to them, so it is up to teachers to help learners establish their identities. This is true of adult and higher education students, and even more so of younger students, whose identities are much more fluid.

As a window into what parameters identity may take, we turn to Tod Anderson’s summary of secondary student participation in online learning across British Columbia. Anderson provides a snapshot for technological understanding from a locale that might represent a best case scenario—or at least a fairly advanced one—in which he notes that the technologies in use have, to a large extent, been adopted from higher education, and that secondary schools face many of the same issues that tertiary and adult educators have been facing for several years.

It is worth bearing in mind that as the technologies that Anderson discusses trickle down through the educational system into younger people’s hands, his snapshot is potentially a portrait of the future for elementary educators. This underscores the necessity for considering learners’ identities from the very beginning of online work, rather than just as a concern of secondary and tertiary students.

As students establish their identities, they have to negotiate and engage with other students, and in online courses channels for negotiation and engagement are necessarily different from traditional classrooms. The power of online classrooms does not simply arise out of their time- and space-shifting potentials, but also from the potential of diverse sets of many-to-many relationships as students engage with each other. Many of the lessons we aim to teach students are not simply to do with mastering course content, but also involve understandings of issues involved in working with others and collaborating towards shared goals; online environments can help us realize these aims.

Finally, we examine identities through the lens of eportfolios, which can be viewed as snapshots of learner identity at particular moments in time, created either to facilitate reflection or to allow evaluation by a teacher or consideration by an employer.