Rachel

Progression. For me that is what this module has been about; learning and developing my understanding of life online in many areas, and reflecting on how this impacts my own, especially my online identity. At the beginning of the module we were asked to fill out a self-test and then reflect back on it once all topics were completed. Continue reading →

Topic 5….wow that went quickly! These past five topics have really changed my understanding of not only the subjects themselves but also the benefits of blogging. This week I really enjoyed reading around about Open Access. I think in particular how it relates to higher education institutions as it is something I frequently encounter with online journals. Continue reading →

Open access to online content. A somewhat confusing sentence, so think of it this way: open access is like an unlocked door, you don’t need a key to open. Still a bit puzzled? Don’t worry I was at first too, check out Wiley’s short cartoon that helps give a general overview of what open access means. For a content producer specifically it is debatable whether the rewards are great enough to make their content freely available online. Continue reading →

I think this has been my favourite topic so far. The flexibility and freedom resulted in really differing and interesting blog posts, which I personally found created the most engaging debates. I particularly enjoyed Catherine’s Blog – it dealt with a subject I think can be quite difficult to talk about at times, what happens when twitter goes wrong. I enjoyed Ed’s video at the beginning of his post. Continue reading →

Social media can be great. However the majority of us were born before any platforms like Snapchat and Twitter, were invented. So how and at what age do we teach children the appropriate and ethical way to behave online? And do adults even understand these ideas  of privacy themselves? (Greenwald, 2014). This is a question troubling many educators as the age at which children have access to the online world is getting younger and younger (Mullen, et al., 2014). Continue reading →

The topic of online identity is one I found really interesting! When I thought about creating an authentic professional profile, I perhaps naively assumed this meant having an update to date LinkedIn profile for employers to peruse at their leisure. Continue reading →

On the surface these two seem completely disconnected, but think of it this way – you have around 10 seconds to impress a recruiter, no longer than the max snapchat (Nyman, 2014). This appears to be a problem with professional profiles in the internet age, the ease of finding applicants and as such, the difficulty of standing out. So how do we as the “net generation” (Tapscott, 2014), get noticed? The answer lies in how we build our professional profile. Continue reading →

Reflecting back on the topic of Identities, I have learnt a lot. To be honest it was an area I thought I was quite well informed about as my dissertation is based around self identity and Instagram. However researching and writing this blog post has allowed me to think more in-depth about my own online identities and how just because I prefer to have them one, multiple identities can be extremely beneficial in some cases. Continue reading →

Online identities is a topic I find particularly interesting as I’m basing my dissertation around it – but what actually is a digital identity? Costa and Torres described online identities as an activity centralised around “presentation and reputation” (2011). Suggesting that our online identities are managed representations of our true selves. Continue reading →

I am very grateful that Topic 1 was formally assessed as it allowed me to have a trial run with blogging. Having never written a blog before I personally found it very different to the academic style writing I’m used to submitting for University projects. This also allowed me to get to grips with how to use WordPress, for example learning how to include images and links and still make the whole blog post look presentable and nice! Figure 1 – http://b-metro. Continue reading →