My Professional Self

I've just read a chapter in the book The digital academic: Critical perspectives on digital technologies in higher education. This piece was written by Inger Mewburn (The Thesis Whisperer) and Pat Tomson (Patter), both of whom I've been reading quite a bit lately. There are several points in the chapter that resonate for this work I'm doing as an Open Education Fellow with eCampus Ontario.

Although the focus of this chapter is about blogging through a doctorate, it has relevant insights for me as I blog through this fellowship. I am creating my 'professional self' as an open educator in a specific manner - one that may not be evident as I do this work. When I get to a point of 'completion' I'll be able to look back, pull the data from the various social media spaces, analyze the qualitative and quantitative content, and hopefully provide some insights into this work.

The data collection conducted by the two authors was done using Survey Monkey, targeting those who were in their doctoral programmes and who were regular or intermittent bloggers. They selected 193 respondents from the 278 responses and used software (DeDoose) to code the data. Four trends became evident - creating a scholarly persona, slow thinking, pleasure seeking, and knowledge sharing. These are definitely four reasons why I blog in many specific circumstances and topics.

For this blog site, the key purpose here is for slow thinking and sharing resources, insights and topics of interest with myself. This is not a fully open site or one that is my usual blogging space, but it is not hidden or private. I do have another blog site that is both, where I post thoughts that are mine alone, not open for public consumption. My public and professional self does have a private space for reflection and engagement as well. So many layers and levels of negotiation into the open learning and teaching spaces are necessary and healthy, I think.

I'll go back to the DeDoose site and read/review the users guide to learn more about this technology in preparation for my upcoming course.