Networked Pedagogy, with Bonnie Stewart

Bonni: [00:00:00] On today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed, Bonnie Stewart talks about networked pedagogy.

Production Credit: [00:00:09] Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni: [00:00:19] Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to increase our personal productivity so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

Bonni: [00:00:46] I’ve been following today’s guest’s work for a long time as she says in her bio she does her best thinking aloud on Twitter as @bonstewart. And I would have to concur with that although I’ve also really enjoyed reading her publications which have shown up in places like Salon, The Guardian UK and Inside Higher Ed, in addition to a variety of peer reviewed venues.

Bonni: [00:01:13] Bonnie Stewart is an education researcher and practitioner fascinated by who we are when we’re online. She is a coordinator of adult teaching and professional learning at the University of Prince Edward Island where she completed her Ph.D. in educational studies. Bonnie leads digital strategy and professional learning initiatives. Her research focuses primarily on digital literacy as a network scholarship and the intersections of knowledge and technologies. Bonnie Stewart, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Stewart: [00:01:49] Thanks Bonni. I’m very happy to be here.

Bonni: [00:01:52] We’re going to start our conversation going back in time. Today we are talking about networked pedagogy and networked learning. And I wonder if you could contrast a little bit for me your own experience in college and does learning look a lot different today for students or is it pretty much the same.

Stewart: [00:02:11] I mean it’s such a big question from for me going back to college is going back in time more than I actually like to admit. But I started college in 1989 and I think two key differences for me in terms of thinking about the learning experience and the sort of undergraduate experience then because my my undergraduate experience I went to a small university not far from where I grew up but I grew up in Ireland and I couldn’t get out of here fast enough.

Stewart: [00:02:44] At 17 I hightailed it away and went to this small college which was my first time living on my own. And all those things. I would say that probably learning may not even have been at the core of my undergraduate degree in the formal studying learning.

Stewart: [00:03:03] But certainly networks were a part of my learning. I do a lot of talking about networks with audiences and students and in different settings. And one of the things when I’m introducing the concept is first I kind of introduced the visual of you know the idea of nodes and connections between them.

Stewart: [00:03:21] But then I’ll say look this is not a digital concept. Do you have a family. Of course hands go up because pretty much everybody has some experience with family although they’re very different. And even within a family each relationship is different each if you think of each person as in mood.

Stewart: [00:03:39] And then the history of communications between them is building that relationship that sort of align the tie between those two people. It gives people a way of sort of thinking about how how networks operate.

Stewart: [00:03:53] And so I think networks are foundational structure of human experience you know and identity and and as ties to the world around us. But when I went to college certainly my learning was networked in the sense that I was connected to the formal courses and books and textbooks to often the thought of dead people you know but still those were essentially ties or relationships I was building with those people’s thoughts but they tended to be one way relationships.

Stewart: [00:04:26] In some of my seminar courses because I went to a small college. By the time that I hit third and fourth year I was in some seminar class is good you know 12 or 15 students and so we were encouraged to contribute and to share our thoughts verbally as well as in the writing or informal essays. But those stop at the walls of the classroom.

Stewart: [00:04:47] And if I wanted to get information to bring to bear on what I was supposed to be reading I had to physically go to the library and so the two core differences that I see are both that we now live in. You know a much more dramatic version of knowledge abundance since we have access to all kinds of things that we’re not physically text that we’re not physically accessible to me at that small university.

Stewart: [00:05:19] And I still at the same time struggle with how to find the right thing how to judge whether something that I could learn from is something I should be learning from or how to contextualize it.

Stewart: [00:05:32] But that abundance is different than it was in 1989 for sure. And the other pieces that was in the classroom piece that my learning experience as an undergraduate simply by nature of the communications available to us largely stopped at the walls of the classroom.

Stewart: [00:05:51] I wrote something down from my professors once I went and gave a talk at an undergraduate conference but other than that really I was bound by what could be communicated to states to communicate in writing.

Stewart: [00:06:04] And now there are networked means by which students can make contributions to the body of knowledge and the body of learning and to knowledge abundance at any stage in their learning experience that can be part of something that other people can google and search and learn from. And that’s wonderful.

Stewart: [00:06:26] At the same time it puts a greater onus on on all of us to do good work and it can be you know difficult for students to feel comfortable contributing to public bodies of knowledge when they’re still kind of learning the forms of communication that are kind of considered valid. I’m in the process of cleaning out my house right now.

Stewart: [00:06:52] And I went back and through a large pile of things recently this weekend in involved in that was you know finding an essay on acid rain from high school or an undergraduate essay on Dylan Thomas. And they’re painful to read. Right. And I’m kind of glad that frankly those are not out in the public domain. And so how we support students to learn and yet learn in public and be comfortable with what they’re putting out. Those are challenges that I don’t think my undergraduate professors were certainly thinking about.

Bonni: [00:07:30] I’ve been really intrigued by some of the tools that exist that allow us to make our networks more visual in a prior episode, Ken Bower shared about one that does it for some Twitter connections and conversations.

Bonni: [00:07:46] And for a while Linked-In was doing this feature they don’t do it any more but it would actually map out your network as it existed on LinkedIn and it was really fascinating to see and you sort of talked about the nodes and the way that they connect.

Bonni: [00:08:01] And if I think about my undergraduate experience you really described it because the classroom was very central and if I were to picture that the professor would be the one you know pontificating the knowledge and boy did I ever take a heck of a lot of notes and recorded with those tape recorders. A lot of conversations I never went back and listened to.

Bonni: [00:08:21] And then the library was another central place for knowledge. And then now I will regularly do it it doesn’t insult me but I’ll regularly say oh I can’t think of the name of that movie or the TV show and the students will take out their phones and they can answer it before I can ever pull it up in my own brain it’s really amazing.

Bonni: [00:08:38] But talk a little bit more about how our capacity for networked learning really even sometimes supersedes one’s ability to facilitate it because there’s these challenges that exist right even if I can see that that exists.

Bonni: [00:08:54] There’s still that feeling of gosh but what’s my role then as a teacher how has that evolved and where do you see a common challenges with people as they try to start to think differently about how they teach.

Stewart: [00:09:07] I think there are there are a ton of challenges and the ones that I run into even myself are related to my own shifting sense of my role. And I think it’s really important. You can read my mind do network learning with students. You cannot facilitate network learning without some kind of mental concept of networked pedagogy or digital pedagogy.

Stewart: [00:09:34] And that’s where I have really enjoyed the work that I’ve done with hybrid pedagogy and digital pedagogy both because it’s kind of given me a central place to hang some of this interest in how networks intersect with education because I think that they’re thinking critically about how do we approach the capacity of digital spaces learning spaces.

Stewart: [00:09:56] But rather than just assuming that it will happen pedagogy to me implies sort of intentional phosphor critical way of walking into this war as facilitator in this space where the classroom is no longer necessarily bound by its walls.

Stewart: [00:10:16] And so the pieces that come up for me… You have mentioned, I think, you had put in front of me, Bonni, the image that I have on my bunch your com website and it’s just an image that I had actually drawn as I type my first dig ped lab. A week long institute in the summer of 2000 15 and I was thinking about all the things that we were going over that week and trying to play with alliteration essentially.

Stewart: [00:10:46] But I wrote sort of navigating networked pedagogy and then I was trying to think about all the things that started with P that I could identify as those sort of challenges and themes.

Stewart: [00:10:57] And I started with practices in profile because I often think of think of teaching as an identity. And so when we are thinking about networked pedagogy youre not just thinking about identity but your your profile and how that is visible how people can access some sense of you beyond just what you bring to a physical or digital classroom space but also your practices.

Stewart: [00:11:23] And so the practices that you engage in as a professional I have questions written there about sort of their personal professional divide as much as we have tended to think about that because teacher identity. I started as a candidate of teacher and I teach kids 12 teachers sometimes and there is a very strong emphasis still in teaching for teachers to separate their personal and professional lives to keep that sort of sense of the the private domain the personal domain away from what their students interact with.

Stewart: [00:11:59] And I think the networked pedagogy and just living in an networked age and in in an age of abundance where people can Google search other people begin to collapse some of that divide by default.

Stewart: [00:12:15] And I think different educators have different levels of comfort with that. I’m not sure that a complete collapse is actually ever I wouldn’t say that a complete collapse of the personal and professional is something that we ever see actually.

Stewart: [00:12:31] I know that it’s the fear of some people that they will be end up entirely exposed but for the most part people curious their their identity in digital spaces just as we do in them in personal spaces.

Stewart: [00:12:46] But I think that it is important to allow a little more of the personal land in network spaces because people can only build relationships based on having some sense of who you are as a person. When we go to conferences we don’t walk around with our sort of latest academic paper in our hands going hello. Would you like to read the paper. We say hi. You know. I see you’re from this college I have a friend who went there or we say hey shoes or we say hey did you enjoy the sandwiches.

Stewart: [00:13:17] When we make small talk because that’s how humans build a sense of a tie with each other we don’t start with formal concepts. And so having educator identities that are centered around only talking about professional things doesn’t necessarily work as well in network spaces as it’s harder to go to community. And that sense of being a relational place where there are people and colleagues that you can interact with. And so those practices and profiles are deeply interconnected for me.

Bonni: [00:13:50] Especially if we want to have more deep learning happening with our students we’re really asking them to be vulnerable in that. And if we think that the best scenario then is just for us to be this wall that doesn’t say anything it doesn’t it doesn’t really mirror for them the kind of vulnerability that I think is really needed for that deeper learning.

Bonni: [00:14:11] Although I really do my work sometimes with educators as well I started teaching a couple of times a year and a doctoral program for educators and I really recognize the need in me to be more sensitive to this and they’ll really share their fears and their stories with me around the private.

Bonni: [00:14:28] And yet I still like to have examples of showing them where there have been people who have really been able to do something really unique with their careers that I think sometimes isn’t a traditional educators path but really shows them a whole different space that they may not have been familiar with in the past.

Stewart: [00:14:47] I think there is a really interesting space in the middle of that personal professional mix and it’s what comes to life. If you are successful in building those kind of genuine relationships where suddenly you’re your network of peers isn’t just the people in your staffroom or in your faculty it’s that people could be in any variety of places around the world I mean limited by the language capacity and all of those pieces right.

Stewart: [00:15:14] There’s an English dominant piece always at work there but my eyelids back on the small island where I grew up. The people here who are interested in the things that I’m interested in both personally and professionally are small number.

Stewart: [00:15:31] And so the whole long tail of the Internet where there there may not be a million people interested in the same things that I’m interested in the world. But there might be you know 40000 of them and through networks I’ve managed to come to know 400 or a thousand or 4000 of them. I wouldn’t have known those people otherwise.

Stewart: [00:15:52] It allows me to be in conversations that I would not otherwise be in and to explore and dig into aspects of education in my own learning and my teaching that I otherwise wouldn’t get to as much as I value my work colleagues. We just don’t necessarily all share quite the same interests.

Stewart: [00:16:12] And so that that value of of the personal professional collapse I think is important and I think it’s often what we’re encouraging students to engage in if they engage in that workspaces. But certainly we need to model.

Stewart: [00:16:26] We can’t. What I always say you can teach digital skills you don’t have. But, you can’t teach digital literacies you don’t have. And so if you approach the web as what Dave White and Dan Lykos would call a visitor’s page right. Just somewhere to go and get things done.

Stewart: [00:16:42] And there I approach many platforms on the web as places to go and get things done. I don’t have a YouTube channel. I go there just to watch videos with my kids to show them the 80s. But I don’t approach the web as just a place that’s task oriented. I see it as a place where there are people.

Stewart: [00:17:01] And that sort of literacy that understanding that this is a place where you can build relationships is very important to model and scaffold when you are not going to discover it on your own. It’s kind of you have refused it and don’t legitimize it by your own practice.

Stewart: [00:17:20] So many other P’s that I’ve looked at though because this raises the issue of course privacy right and public private and I think there’s a there’s a difference between the personal professional access. Which I do think tends to be more collapsed in network pedagogy and network practice than the public private access. And I don’t think that those two maps against each other identically there aren’t even those people who are most personal and visible and sort of valuable on the web.

Stewart: [00:17:52] The ones we’re all talking and and always there and you think you know a lot about their lives. There is always a whole lot that you do not see that is not shared. I learned as I started on the web 10 years ago as a blogger I loved the early years of and from an identity perspective as sort of a poopy diapers perspective.

Stewart: [00:18:17] I got to know a lot of people who were also doing sort of creative nonfiction and building networks at that time in those kind of semi picos high blogging days.

Stewart: [00:18:30] And as I got to know them in person through conferences and that sort of thing there was both the intimacy of having a deep sense of what someone’s internal sort of narratives were and at the same time recognizing that there are more aspects of their lives that were never talked about that identity that is shared and can appear very vulnerable and very very personal is still still has aspects of privacy.

Stewart: [00:18:56] There are still windows that you’re not seeing. And recently George Veletsianos and I did a piece of research and study into disclosures among academics online. We found the same type of thing, that well even when people were choosing to disclose personal challenges or professional challenges that made them vulnerable. You know in online spaces, there were still always things that were not being disclosed.

Stewart: [00:19:21] And so recognizing that there is that distinction between the personal and the private can be encouraging for people who may simply feel kind of uncomfortable with the whole idea of sharing at all that you STILL don’t you don’t have to share everything. It doesn’t mean that you’re vomiting it all out on the internet.

Bonni: [00:19:38] You talked about the personal and professional collapse scene as it relates to our profiles. If I got that right and then personal professional collapsing or not as it relates to privacy could you maybe give an example of you one of those so I can understand a little bit more of the distinction and how those may or may not collapse.

Stewart: [00:19:59] I would say that I see that personal professional collapse seen as relating to both profiles practices and the idea of privacy. I guess I would playing with intentionally.

Stewart: [00:20:15] But if you are going to build a reasonably successful profile that has a strong sort of network where you then have an audience to see you as a person.

Stewart: [00:20:27] You actually have to share something of yourself as a person if you simply go on Twitter or into network space and perform an identity that’s the equivalent of walking around a conference with your paper in hand saying hello please read my paper. You are not going to find that you have a particularly robust or personal or caring network because you have not necessarily engaged in any kind of two way human social grooming that builds relationships. Right?

Stewart: [00:20:59] If you share a little bit more about yourself you show an interest in other people’s sharing. And so if your practices are such that you are engaging in two way communication then you are sharing what other people share like tweeting or connecting with others and expressing interest in what they do even while keeping probably huge aspects of your professional and personal life private.

Stewart: [00:21:25] Nonetheless you will build a much greater profile and more robust network of colleagues and peers who are interested in the things that you are and who are also interested in you as a person. Right?

Stewart: [00:21:39] So that that collapse between the personal and the professional is more just a way of being in network spaces. We don’t necessarily have the face to face information that we have in available to us when we’re in each other’s physical space where I can see what you’re wearing and who you are and how you are presenting yourself as a person.

Stewart: [00:22:01] We need to do a little bit more explicit work or signal sending online just to give people the same kind of personal signals that we do just by physically being in our space. And so that has to be a little bit more intentional and people who tend to use the web solely to communicate one way professionally unless they are already people other people consider important or already famous they will not tend. As I found in my research at least to have the same level of people invested in their profile on them.

Bonni: [00:22:39] I really find that to be true for myself I’m thinking about some tweets that I sent that unexpectedly got a heightened level of interaction and that was like the time I expressed that fear you have that gut-wrenching fear when you’re about to have to send an e-mail to all faculty. Well.

Bonni: [00:22:57] And I said that to me I thought maybe I’m the only one that feels that way and that that was I got tons of people saying oh that’s the worst thing in my job I can’t stand whenever I have to send those e-mails and my heart went out to you and all of that.

Bonni: [00:23:07] And then you know occasionally I don’t I don’t. Right now our kids are at such an age that I feel OK sharing their photos on social media but there will come a time when they’re old enough that that’s their own agency to decide to what extent that they want to share things online and I’m somewhat sensitive to that.

Bonni: [00:23:25] The other thing when you were talking about privacy there’s also the aspect of that which we choose to keep private because of our own pedagogy. So I think for myself I really prefer for the most part to keep my politics out of a classroom and therefore often times out of much of my social media. That doesn’t mean that you won’t ever go to Facebook or Twitter which I treat differently.

Bonni: [00:23:52] And ever see something that you could classify as political but I like to have our students thinking more deeply than the binary way we treat politics today. And so therefore I don’t want them to label me with you know the giant donkey or that giant elephant and think that that’s that that’s going enough in having these kinds of discussions. I would think that there would be aspects to that which we keep private to be more of a question asker than a statement maker. Does that make any sense.

Stewart: [00:24:24] I think it does. And I think I might see that certainly from the overt like big political sides maybe differently because I’m Canadian and know our critical environment. It’s just it’s I was a deeply impacted by yours. But at the moment somewhat less binary somewhat less sensational .

Bonni: [00:24:44] We are all about to move to see you. So your neighborhood is going to be very crowded here.

Stewart: [00:24:48] I mean I don’t know. I it so yes. It’s I don’t talk about my party politics online. But at the same time I probably do still adhere to sort of the personal and political and I think that pedagogy is probably always political.

Stewart: [00:25:05] And because I work in the fact that the education that is deeply driven by social justice principles that’s kind of always been part of the work that I do. So maybe that that piece is probably a little bit more on my sleeve in terms of both my face to face and my social media or networked engagements as an educator.

Stewart: [00:25:29] I but I think certainly people will choose to keep various things back or various conversations that they are not necessarily wanting to bring and bring into the classroom. I do think it’s also important to recognize that especially if we’re asking students to engage and my students are educators.

Stewart: [00:25:50] So I’m in an interesting position there. My students are all either pre-service teachers, masters level people like teachers who are in the system and coming back to do a master’s, or college educators who are doing a certificate or a bachelor’s in adult education.

Stewart: [00:26:06] And so that’s the context in which I teach so I’m teaching people who are teaching. But I’m asking them to take this sort of step to share things publicly have to recognize that privacy is to some extent related to privilege. And so some people can keep certain things private because they’re members of a dominant group. Politics and religion etc. may not be as assumed on certain types of bodies.

Stewart: [00:26:30] If people are out in terms of their sexual orientation there are politics that are involved there but they are not necessarily able to keep out of their education or may not wish to keep out of their education or may need to keep out of their teaching and education in order to keep their jobs depending on the context. Right.

Stewart: [00:26:48] But things like the ways in which bodies are marked by gender or the ways in which bodies are marked by by race things that are visible to others get still inform people as well as educators. People’s teaching and the way that their voices in their authority are received in classrooms and in social media.

Stewart: [00:27:09] And so it’s important to recognize that while I can talk to my students about privacy different students may be taking different kinds of risks in the classroom and in networks simply by virtue of how other people are buying what they say. So I would think that privacy is a little bit complex.

Bonni: [00:27:30] Oh absolutely. I know the last two pieces of your piece which I’m cracking up because I told you how much this graphic resonated with me and until you said it I didn’t recognize the alliteration in it so we’ve got platforms and proprietary spaces talk a little bit about that.

Stewart: [00:27:46] But I like the piece because I was probably the same reason I like Twitter. I enjoy the challenges of limitations and I think like what can I do when I limit myself to 140 characters or what can I do and I limit myself to the letter P.

Stewart: [00:28:01] But the platform to me when you’re thinking about network pedagogics then you’re inherently thinking about two linked concepts which is the fact that you have to use certain kinds of digital platforms in order to facilitate this engagement and engagement in more on networked digital platforms is always with danah boyd calls persistent replicable scalable and searchable.

Stewart: [00:28:26] So anything that I encourage students to put out there can be searched under their name it can stay there for as long as the Internet. It can be screen captured it can be searched under your name and it can go viral. Right.

Stewart: [00:28:39] And so that’s a particular risk essentially that I’m asking students to take that I wouldn’t be asking them to take if I if they were writing me a five paragraph essay and that if I’m asking them to use these cases for the most part these are proprietary spaces they’re not neutral they’re not pedagogically neutral they’re not politically neutral they’re not just sort of benign things that exist in the world.

Stewart: [00:29:05] They’re there to collect data. They are there to sell people stuff. And so I consider it my role as someone who engages in networked pedagogy to also be a teacher of critical media literacy in the most classic sense right now not just digital media literacy but the same stuff that I was teaching in the late 90s.

Stewart: [00:29:28] You know Noam Chomsky type stuff, who owns this space. How does it make money. What is its purpose. Well who is message directed at? Who does it favor, who does it all of those pieces right. Those are the same questions that we still need to be thinking about when we are encouraging people to engage in network practice.

Stewart: [00:29:50] And I’m both I have benefited myself personally a great deal from Network practice. I still think there is a great deal of value in encouraging network practice among educators and I’m also deeply deeply wary of the spaces that I do with it.

Stewart: [00:30:07] I recognize that something like Twitter could disappear tomorrow and then essentially it would be for me like having the staffroom in my mind disappear. There are hundreds of people whom I value who may have had meaningful conversations with whose work I kind of ambiant me interact with regularly who suddenly I wouldn’t even have another way of contact and that’s a weird situation. But that’s a reality if you’re if you’re you know engaging as a network educator.

Stewart: [00:30:37] So that’s how I see those two piece going together the platforms and the proprietary spaces are have yet to caution that I have to put out there and if I am I’m always navigating them myself and I it’s my responsibility to make that visible to people when I’m teaching them about networked pedagogy or teaching them through networked pedagogy and to invite their thoughts on navigating those and to sort of share my own. Here’s what I’ve learned along the way for them to consider for themselves as well.

Bonni: [00:31:13] This is the point in this show where we each get to give recommendations and mine is related to what you just shared about under privacy. You mentioned you mentioned that a lot of this has to do with our own sense of privilege and that’s just something that keeps coming back to me.

Bonni: [00:31:30] And there was an episode of HybridPod which is the podcast that’s put out by the digital pedagogy lab which you mentioned earlier Bonnie.

Bonni: [00:31:39] And it’s an episode it was episode 11 I’ll be linking into it in the show notes if anyone wants to take a listen. And it was called Openness and it was with Chris Friend, Greg Curran and Paul France and they all share it about their own…

Bonni: [00:31:56] And you used the phrase coming now their own coming out in the classroom as gay men and when they decide to do that and when they decide not to do that.

Bonni: [00:32:04] And it had a little bit of some back and forth a real good conversation on Twitter privately with Chris just about it really was kind of hammering home with me saying you know I can just cavalierly say oh you’re my husband and I know this and they don’t have the choice to do that. And it just really helped helped open up my mind a little bit for thinking a little bit more critically about privacy.

Bonni: [00:32:28] And as you said it’s a very complex subject. I’m interested actually in learning more about the piece that you said that you did with George because I think that would be one be really healthy for me to read and learn more about what you looked at in terms of disclosure.

Bonni: [00:32:41] So that’s my recommendation is just to be thinking about this issue of privacy and where perhaps if anyone joins me in questioning others reluctance to share more that I’m hearing from these three men and their own stories was really a powerful way to keep myself in check on that one so that’s what I would recommend. How about you Bonnie?

Stewart: [00:33:00] Well what you asked me when we thought about recommendations sort of what had your attention recently and what kept my attention recently is stuff because like I mentioned we have a dumpster in our driveway right now and I’m clearing out in some cases stuff I’ve been skirting around for thirty years.

Stewart: [00:33:17] And so I actually forced myself to sit down and I got rid of the bike that I crashed in 1985 which has beem moldering. All these years unridden because the frame is essentially bent always that I might think that it might be cool. Let that go.

Stewart: [00:33:32] Started looking through the things that I saved including those papers that I wrote in high school and in college I found an overhead remember overhead transparency of course overhead from the first university level course I ever taught in 1998.

Stewart: [00:33:47] And it was an overhead of both the Internet which made me laugh and I shared it actually on Twitter and it sort of said this overhead transparency about the internet. I’ve been teaching for too long but that’s the piece that was interesting for me was the questions that are in that are largely questions that I would still ask.

Stewart: [00:34:05] And part of me felt like Oh look I was doing good work back then that’s nice to know because I didn’t feel that way necessarily looking at my undergraduate essays and we felt like wow you know this is 18 years and where are we going with this relationship to the Internet.

Stewart: [00:34:22] But what I found from the process of going through all these things going. Going back in time in my own time to look at these pieces that I kept over the years I realized that I think identity is always something that we are curating.

Stewart: [00:34:39] I have a pretty good memory and I haven’t thought of a lot of things that I thought about this weekend until I was sort of faced with the artifacts and I had to king of go through and be like why did I say this and why did I. I remember the other thing that I actually didn’t say and I realized that I’ve been curating my identity since long before there was an Internet.

Stewart: [00:34:57] We curate in the things that we save from things we need to regenerate and go back and actually let ourselves kind of catch up to who we are. Now hopefully if we’re lucky we’ll find that there’s some kind of common thread like I found in my sort of questions about the Internet from 1998 but I think it’s OK to go back and look at your stuff and maybe some of it away and let it go and consider who you are now.

Stewart: [00:35:24] And we have a real discomfort society right now related to this network pedagogics stuff of identity not being authentic. I’m not sure that there’s ever been such a thing as an authentic identity I think as long as we’ve had ways of externalizing our identity into artefacts into writing into stuff with sort of internal audiences that these are intended for. I think we’ve always been creating identity.

Stewart: [00:35:50] So I think we need to maybe think about developing our comfort with our online profiles and our online identity. Not as you know authentic but just as reflections of who and how we see ourselves in a given time. So that’s what I’ve been sort of musing on just under the under the bows of my head the last few days by sorting out this whole pile of files.

Bonni: [00:36:14] There’s been a lot of conversations online about stuff I know Audrey Watters just went through and took a whole storage unit that she had and part of it was the contents of her husband who passed away 10 or 11 years ago.

Bonni: [00:36:29] And I was thinking oh gosh. And that got me thinking too about what we do when we pass away be what we’ll be leaving for other people to digitally look through or not. And that just brings up so many complicated questions. But I do like this ongoing challenge you have for us to think about our identity as something that we are curating and that’s a process not a destination for sure.

Stewart: [00:36:53] Yeah hopefully you know you never never fully get there.

Bonni: [00:36:57] Well Bonnie thank you so much for accepting the invitation to being on the show. As I said I’ve admired your work for a long time and have learned a lot from you and is just so such a treat to get to have this conversation with you and talk more about Networked Pedagogy.

Stewart: [00:37:10] Bonni, it was my pleasure. And it’s always good to talk to another Bonni.

Bonni: [00:37:14] Yes of course. Thanks once again to Dr. Bonnie Stewart for being on the show today and thanks to all of you for listening. As always if you have yet to subscribe to the weekly update from me that’s just a single e-mail that’ll come in your inbox once a week that has all the show notes with the links of the things that Bonnie and I talked about.

Bonni: [00:37:36] And you can get that if you subscribe and included in that e-mail is a. Blog post written by me about teaching or productivity. And then you’ll also when you subscribe you’ll get a book called The edtech Essentials Guide with tools to help you use technology to facilitate learning in your productivity.

Bonni: [00:37:56] Thanks so much for listening. If you have been enjoying the show I would highly encourage you to leave a radio interview for it on iTunes or whatever service you use to listen because that really helps grow our community and get more guests interested in coming on the show and have more interesting conversations on places like Twitter and the slack channel. Thanks so much for listening and I’ll see you next time.

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.