An interesting post here from David White at Oxford on digital identity in educational settings. I particularly agree with his focus on shifting the emphasis from the internet as a broadcast/ content distribution channel to thinking in terms of relationships which “focuses back on the heart of teaching and learning.”
But I think his notion of a digital tutor or student identity overly simplifies the issue. A person will tend to have multiple virtual and non-virtual/ actual (?) identities with different purposes or goals that may conflict with one another – but this may be less of an issue within the closed walls of a university VLE. Furthermore, the recipient of the projection of the identity may read that identity in a very different way and understand it in tems of a very different purpose. So my identity as projected via facebook may be aimed at relationships with long time friends and so have many complex and subtle facets yet someone else seeing my profile may ‘read’ that identity in different (unflattering) ways. So while moving out of the:
recent epistemological cul-de-sac that is the digital identity of the individual by considering not what digital identity is but where it leads.
let not loose sight of the richness, complexity, ambiguity and difficulty of digital identity for the purposes of being pragmatic.