In a previous post, I wrote about the children’s online identities:-
In her email to me, Jackie’s thoughts included:
- the idea of exploring the area of gendered representations of identity
She was referring to the children’s use of ‘weemees‘ to represent themselves.
This weekend I came across a book edited by David Buckingham entitled: Youth, Identity and Digital Media via this website. In the section Introducing Identity, David Buckingham adds his contribution. I’ve incuded ‘snipits’ here:
- Identity is an ambiguous and slippery term. It has been used—and perhaps overused—in many different contexts and for many different purposes, particularly in recent years.
- Susannah Stern’s discussion of young people’s online authorship of blogs and home pages suggests that this activity can provide important opportunities for self-reflection and self-realization, and for expressing some of the conflicts and crises that characterize this period. Some of the young people whom she discusses explicitly see adolescence as an “in-between stage,” in which they are consciously seeking future directions in their lives.
- The extent to which all social interaction is a kind of performance. ……… The issue of performance is also very relevant to the ways in which young people construct identities, for example, via the use of avatars, e-mail signatures, IM nicknames, and (in a more elaborate way) in personal homepages and blogs.
The children in p7v enjoyed creating vokis. Some have embeded them in their sidebars. I’ve included an example here.
[kml_flashembed movie="http://vhss-a.oddcast.com/voki/voki_player.swf?doc=http%3A%2F%2Fvhss-d.oddcast.com%2Fphp%2Fvoki%2Fgetvoki%2Fchsm%3Dcb899af27745f54718f5743d8cf462c9%26sc%3D34031" width="150" height="200" wmode="transparent" /]
Another example can be seen on Fraser’s Blog
Below is an example of a 3D avatar some of the pupils have been playing around with.
More from David Buckingham’s contribution:
- Rebekah Willett, for example, looks at how girls’ online play with dressing up dolls raises questions about body image …
- Sandra Weber and Claudia Mitchell also address questions of gender and ethnicity, looking at how the markers of positive identities can be quite subtly coded in young people’s online expressions……..
- Simply keeping pace with the range of young people’s engagements with digital media is an increasingly daunting task.
- Even so, our hope for this book is that the theme of identity will provide a useful lens through which to view particular aspects of young people’s relations with digital media more clearly.
I believe that having the freedom to personalise their own blogs is an important motivational factor for the pupils in my class. Recently, I decided to move the children’s individual blogs away from ‘learnerblogs’ and over to ‘edublogs’. This was a safety decision (I’ll put on a post to explain the reasoning behind this decision soon!). I contemplated reducing their set roles from administrator to editor until I discovered that this would mean that they would no longer have access to the different themes available.
Customising their own spaces has allowed them to share their online identity with their audience. Courtney recently posted to her new blog (she uses ‘text’ speech in her blog). I’ve included part of it here:
‘……I would like to say soz to everyone who Read’s ma blog for not doin task a week but ma other pages are @ da side now not da top We have just moved blog so I’m a bit higglty pigglty write Now…………’
Denying them the opportunity to put their own stamp on their new blogs was not an option 
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