This time it's personal

Today turned out to be a Personal Learning Environments sort of day for me. Firstly, I read a cracking blog by D'Arcy Norman on PLEs which showed some nice diagrams and conceptual maps of his take on PLEs accompanied by some neat explanations. D'Arcy refreshingly takes a connectionist view that the connections to people are more important than the technologies that connect.

Secondly, I joined a new site which has been set up by Cristina Costa over at Learning Journey. It's a Ning site focused on Personal Learning Environments and Digifolios (read e-Portfolios) which as I write this post, already has 48 members. It looks very exciting and seems well worth joining in. The site hosts a workshop which will be delivered on 12 January. The blurb reads:

We live in an era of individual “personalization and customization”. The read and write web has helped develop a new concept - “do it yourself and your own way” . The phenomenon has had implications in our society at different levels - from the way people learn to the new, emerging jobs and employment needs. The workshop aims to help members become aware of the way the web can empower the individual not only to learn, but also to present what, how and with whom he/she learns.

The target audience for the workshop (which spans 6 weeks) is teachers and trainers who know a little about Web 2.0 tools and maybe are using them in real teaching situations. Join up here if you would like to take part.

Multi-me

You can never have too many social networking connections, I reckon. So besides all my Flickring (4 accounts), Twittering, Plurking and Facebooking, and my occasional Slidesharing, Wikiing, Ninging and Elgging, I have also joined the International Edublogger Directory (check out their blog). It won't improve the dubious quality of my blog posts, nor will it make me smarter or better looking. But it might just provide me with some extra connections out there in the blogosphere, and as Cormier and others have made abundantly clear - it's not about nodes, it's the connections that are important.

So I am member 425 on the International Edublogger community now. That's my number and there are 424 others who joined before me and whom I can connect with now, however tenuously.

Got me thinking about personal identity though.... I'm known as Timbuckteeth on most of my virtual spaces (no, not telling), and Loudli Singh (the gangly and strangely silent Asian) in Second Life who just like me, steadfastly refuses to dance. But my personal identity remains largely unchanged, I think. I'm still rooted to the here and now, and still embodied for as long as this human frame I inhabit continues to pulse and breathe away. Yet my digital footprint continues to grow on the web, as do the personal footprints of many others. And with this gradual incursion comes a certain expectation - to continue to inform (and entertain) one's growing audience of casual observers and more interested 'followers' who drop in to see what I am doing and what I am saying about my life, my work, my research, my triumphs .... even my disasters. I am more than a number you see - I am also a series of digital artefacts, a set of tagged photographs, a random collection of videos others have put together and posted up onto Youtube. I am also a series of comments and tags in other people's spaces and a hierarchical sequence of search engine responses on Google. And of course most importantly, I am me - a father, son, husband, brother, friend.

There is a picture of me on my professional website - it was taken at the ALT-C Gala dinner in Leeds this year. I call it 'Multi-me' because the picture shows digital images on cameras held up against my real-world image. That's how I feel sometimes - spread between all the digital environments I visit and the real world I inhabit consistently, even when I don't feel I am totally here. This is member No. 425, going off to get some lunch....