Exercise 5.1: The many faces of you

My personal learning network (PLN) comprises many interfaces including:

MyCSU, Interact, Austar, Wikipedia, Facebook, Google, Images, Email, Edumail, Skype, Blogspot, Broadband ISP, Moodle, Ning, Secondlife

Do you show multiple identities or are you consistent across all instances?

Part of me is consistent and part of me changes - it depends on what interface I'm interacting with. For instance in my blog (Blogspot), I'm pretty focussed on responding to the requirements of 510 in as few words as possible. In Facebook, however, I don't discuss the academic side of my life. Its about old and new friends, keeping in touch with fellow musicians and setting up real world meetings. I use Moodle purely to deliver the courses I teach at my school. It has everything to do with curriculum delivery and assessment....and so it goes. Despite these outward differences, deep inside I feel like I'm always the same person - I'm just showing a different side of me. The real test of whether you are different comes when asked to complete your profile for each interface. I don't do it for everyone because I found that afetr the first few times, I was just repeating myself. It didn't matter whether the site was 'serious' (CSU, Moodle,Blogspot) or 'frivolous' (Facebook)

What does your "persistent identity" online say about you, and what shouldn't it say?

My 'persistent identity' says that I'm a pretty focussed sort of person who has little time for the frivolous. I don't have a problem with that. I'm old enough to know that life is short and that you must get the most out of every waking moment. I don't pretend to think that anything I do is of interest to anyone but I have lately come to realise that in order to find and receive information and support within a network, sometimes you need to tell people about who you are and what you do.

The challenge is to decide how much to divulge and how much to keep to yourself. Obviously I would not divulge banking pin numbers but I would not also divulge a whole lot more information that would not be of use to anyone - just because I don't think it would be necessary for it to be on public domain. So the generic answer is that it should not say anything that you don't want it to say.