Jen Ross from Edinburgh is presenting her paper, Just what is being reflected in online reflection?: new literacies for new media practices. She is exploring reflection in a professional body, and forms the current work in her dissertation. She is looking at areas of identity, authenticity, and performance, especially as found through blogs. She is using blogs as that is a technology that is being used in higher education in several of the virtual learning places, as as such is becoming more HE mainstream (even though, as I pointed out, students have generally moved on to Facebook or the like).
Reflection online needs new literacies–from Carpenter 2009. She speaks how blogging takes on a new significance. She will tell 6 stories on blogging, and will look at these through 6 different blogging lenses:
- Authenticity–blogs should be authentic and honest
- Risk–Sharing too much information is dangerous
- Pretense–No one is really themselves online
- Commodification–Your online presence is your personal brand
- Otherness–What kind of person would do this?
- Narcissism–Bloggers are shallow and self-obsessed
Clear, that I need to read Jen’s work, partly as I blog quite a bit, but also because it seems there may be some similarities with this, both in research as well as in practice. We have an opportunity with online reflection to think about voice.