Mistaken Goal: Where Student Affairs & Technology Meet

Several days ago, I submitted (and then corrected) final grades for my undergraduate online identity course. I am planning to teach the course again next semester and I’ll certainly be making some changes based on this first semester of the class.

First, Clay Shirky’s right: the first challenge when working with young students in discussions about their use of the Internet and other technologies is to help them understand just how different their uses of these technologies are compared to previous generations’. For many of the youngest students, cell phones, MySpace, and wireless Internet access have almost always existed and they have always been part of their lives. While for many of us these technologies and the ideas underlying them - flexible and changing ideas of privacy, incredibly public and intimate expressions of identity, and indexable, searchable, and permanent artifacts - are new and world-changing, for these students these ideas are old-hat and completely non-notable. Next semester, I need to work harder at the very beginning of the class to help my students understand how new and unexplored all of these technologies are for all of us. I’m not quite sure how to do that and figuring that out is my homework during the holiday break.

The final assignment elicited some surprising insight and ideas from my students. In a nutshell, they were to make policy recommendations for the use of social networking services (SNSes) for either a college admissions office or a company hiring new college graduates. The recommendations spanned the entire range of potential recommendations from “they must investigate the profile of every applicant” to “they can never investigate the profiles of applicants” with varying levels of quality support and rationale for the recommendations.

The most surprising and interesting recommendation, submitted by a few students, was that applicants should be able to decide whether or not their SNS profiles are fair game. That is not a recommendation I had anticipated and the justifications were very interesting. Essentially, these students really grabbed hold of some of the ideas we discussed and read that related to the active role we can take in shaping and understanding how we are presented and described online. I haven’t quite figured out how practical the recommendation is when scaled up to institutions or corporations that have thousands of applicants but it’s a great answer for this final assignment and it shows a wonderful grasp of some very important ideas.

I wish I had more time to tackle ideas of privacy and context.  That’s something else I will see if I can work into the course next semester although I am not very hopeful. Given the length of the course, it’s impossible to even touch on every important and interesting topic. I hope to expand the course to a full semester and teach in one of our living-learning centers next year with the hope that will allow me to add these topics and have enough time to explore them.

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about a new half-semester 2-credit undergraduate course I’m teaching here at Indiana University. As promised, I’ve uploaded the class syllabus.

The class has met four times over the last two weeks (it meets twice a week).  It’s still too early to tell how the class is going and how much my students are getting out of the class.  Part of that is directly related to the design of the course as it’s front loaded with sociological material (Cooley & Goffman).  It’s deep, challenging material and it’s hard for some of my students to see where we’re going and how this material relates to the Internet.  “We’re getting there!” I promise them and I hope they believe me because we really are getting there.  And even though I hate that we’re running through these ideas so quickly and doing them such injustice (One day for Cooley’s Looking Glass Self?  Two days for Goffman’s ideas regarding impression management? Are you kidding me???) I believe very strongly that this will pay dividends when we get into the rest of the material by providing crucial and useful lenses and frameworks for us to use in thinking, reading, and talking about online behavior.

I try to keep this blog professional and not spend time discussing my personal trivia and emotions but I have to confess that I’m very excited to read my students’ first assignments which are due on Monday.  I’ve collected feedback from them in class so I am confident that most of them are on the right track and they’re “getting it” but you never know for sure, particularly when you throw a new instructor teaching a new class (with new, untested assignments) into the mix.

As this class continues, I hope that I’ll gain insight into my students’ beliefs and behaviors regarding online behavior and identity.  More importantly, I hope that I’ll be able to make use of and share those insights here.

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This semester I’ll be teaching EDUC-U 212 Virtually Real: Myths and Realities of Online Identities. It’s a 2-credit class for undergraduates that is scheduled for the second half of the fall semester. I’m still finalizing the syllabus and I’ll make it available here when it’s finalized.

In the class, we’re going to explore how youths and young adults use online tools such as Facebook and MySpace to explore and exhibit personal identity. It’s a short course so it will be very focused on identity, mediated communication, and Social Network Sites (SNS). Although it will be firmly grounded in theory and current research, the class will have a very practical bent as students should leave the class better prepared to understand not only their own online actions but also some of the forces shaping those actions. At the end of the class, students should be able to:

• Recognize and describe ways in which people present themselves online
• Describe properties of online communication
• Describe and critically evaluate popular views and (mis)conceptions of online communication and behavior
• Make thoughtful, appropriate, and practical analysis of and recommendations regarding young adults’ use of online communication tools

For those interested in the gory details, we’ll be using Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life as the primary touchstone regarding identity and how identity is performed. We won’t have time to read more than a chapter or two but it’s a very insightful book with powerful but accessible ideas. We’ll also spend time looking at Suler’s Online Disinhibition Effect. Although I perceive some significant flaws in Suler’s ideas (there’s a strong feeling of determinism from which I instinctively cringe) it’s an accessible summary of some important ideas. We’ll also be looking at some of the current research regarding SNS use among youths and undergraduates.

Interested IU undergraduates should be able to sign up for the course using OneStart. If you have any trouble signing up for the course or if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at kguidry@indiana.edu.

Edit: I’ve received a few questions and it may be helpful to answer them here, too. The class is scheduled to meet on Mondays and Wednesdays from 5:00 until 6:15 in Foster SH021. The section number is 33403. And you don’t have to be an active user of Facebook or MySpace to enroll in and benefit from the class assuming that you have some knowledge of those tools and how others are using them.

Update: I’ve uploaded the syllabus.

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