A discussion with Valentina Dodge at last year’s IATEFL conference sowed the seed for the idea of the workshop which I facilitated at this year’s IATEFL conference in Brighton. We were talking about the many talks at the 2010 conference given over to promoting Twitter and other social media in the classroom and whether EFL learners were aware of how sticky and findable their posts were in these media. So was born the idea for the workshop Identity Crisis.
Beginning with the salutary tale of the drunken pirate, a party picture on MySpace which denied the wearer of her Teaching Certificate, I moved on to one of the games from the This is Me collection by the University of Reading. There may be more to the MySpace incident than meets the eye but innocent or not, it can’t be denied that the woman in the picture unwittingly created a major incident through posting her party picture.
How do situations like this happen? One of the games in the This is Me collection consists of a collection of cards on which appear headlines. These headlines could be blog post titles or FaceBook status updates. In small groups of 4-5 people each one in turn picks up the headline which they think is the most likely to grab attention. Once everyone in the group has chosen, the group votes on which headline they think is the one they would be most likely to read. After 4 or 5 rounds, the game stops and you see if there is a ‘winner’; the one in the group with the most winning headlines.
There are two variations to this game, both of which I implemented in the workshop. The first is to have everyone in the group adopt a different role such as ‘party animal’ or ‘political activist’. This leads people targeting different types of headlines instead of all coveting the same one. The second variation is to announce that all players are now looking for a job and their prospective employers are Googling them! This made a few people regret their choices!
Once the play was over we considered some questions:
Meta questions
- Could you use this exercise in your classroom as a language task?
- Could this exercise be useful even if your students are sophisticated social media users?
- Does this exercise mean that educational social media should always be password protected?
Game debrief
- What was most successful in grabbing your attention?
- If someone else was getting attention, were you more likely to choose more extreme headlines?
- Looking back at the way the game went, would you change your attention grabbing strategy?
Inevitably, to win the game, participants had gone for the raciest headlines and this got them into trouble at the job hunting stage. So I rounded off the workshop by looking at the core of the problem which is that in real life it is usual to compartmentalise your life whereas online this is still difficult. Offline, we tend to have different faces which we show to different groups of people such as family, friends, colleagues and clients [Goffman]. The problem online is that social networking and universal IDs are merging all our identities into one. [Adams] There is also the thesis that in traditional village communities we only ever had one face and that it is only urbanisation which has allowed us to develop these different identities.
But nevertheless it seems that we have grown accustomed to our different faces and that the way modern life is constructed means that we need these different identities and most importantly, we need to be able to keep those different identities separate. It is likely that in the end the technology will follow and we will be able to retain separate identities. But in the meantime we should be careful about how we manage them. Resources such as ‘This is Me’ help us pass on that message to our learners so that they don’t become MySpace victims.
The exercise gave rise to lots of discussion at many different levels both for those new to social networking technologies and those exploring more advanced uses of digital tools such as Second Life and the way in which we build up our Second Life avatars. Amongst the audience were two of my online learners, who I normally don’t get to meet so this was an unexpected added bonus of the workshop! Thanks to all those who attended.
Resources to use with students:
Digital Lives – an EU initiative
Digiteen Teacher Guide
‘This is Me’ Universityof Reading
My Footprint
Smokescreen–simulation
References:
The Real Life Social Network V2, Paul Adams 2010
‘The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life’ by Erving Goffman, 1959