Identity+in+Online+Education

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In this chapter, we suggest that identity is the base from which learners' engagement with content, as well as communication with others, begins. 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 those in traditional classrooms. The power of online classrooms arises not simply out of their time- and space-shifting potentials, but also from the potential for diverse sets of many-to-many relationships as students engage with each other. Many of the lessons that 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. Deliberate appraisals of learners' identities in online environments can help us realize these aims. This position is supported by Tod Anderson's summary of secondary student participation in online learning, a summary which 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 the technologies in use have to a large extent been adopted from higher education. We note that secondary schools face many of the same issues that tertiary and adult educators began grappling with years ago, and continue to face. These observations provide a springboard into a wide-ranging discussion of online learners' identities, underscoring the necessity for considering learners' identities from the very beginning of online work, rather than just as a concern of secondary and tertiary educators. The chapter concludes with a concrete example of identity construction and a possible end point to online education in the form of Kathryn Chang Barker and Karen Barnstable's discussion of e-portfolios.

Introduction
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.

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