Written for multimodal researchers interested in young peoples' self-presentation strategies and curation of digital personas.

I submitted 'Inequality in Digital Personas- e-portfolio curricula, cultural repertoires and social media' in mid-February. Some of my thesis' findings and recommendations were removed to meet the 80,000 word restriction. This redacted writing may still have some value to researchers, so I'm sharing them as blog posts. Here's the first (all will be labelled 'PhD' for ease-of-finding):

Research background and three key contributions
Moving image media have become central to the learning and everyday life experiences of young children (Buckingham, 2003, 2013). However, such media are largely ignored in multimodal research, despite its acknowledgement of the importance of computer games, film and television (Kress, 2010). My research made a novel contribution by focusing on visual arts e-portfolio styles. This benefits research into the broad range of texts in the classroom that have resulted from the impact of digital media in the last decade (Bazalgette and Buckingham, 2013).

 My action research project (2009-13) enabled students at two sites, an independent and a government school, to be taught the creative appropriation of online portfolio software, Carbonmade, for curating their electronic learning portfolios (e-portfolios). The two very different sites were chosen for the following reasons: first, I wanted to explore a wide range of students' choices that economic, cultural and social differences might contribute to; secondly, the bandwidth costs of online publication are significant in under-resourced settings (Donner and Walton, 2013), and thirdly, there are massive differentials in South Africans' general levels of access to, and familiarity with, online media (Goldstuck, 2010, 2017).

Aside from assisting students with developing new media literacies as digital curators, my investigation also made valuable contributions through two other methodological innovations. Its longitudinal nature is unusual amongst multimodal studies in spanning three years (2010-12) at an independent school and two years (2012-2013) at a state one. Diachronic changes in students’ digital designs were examined through the novel methodological contribution of a screenshot analysis. My third contribution is an original description of how young people’s access to digital infrastructures influenced their development of a digital hexis for e-portfolio curation and the modal density of their e-portfolio styles.

Although multimodal content analysis proved highly useful, my thesis did not focus on contributing to social semiotics. Nevertheless, interesting findings emerged that contribute to multimodal theory: Researchers have described the dangers of stigma (Trottier, 2013) and oversharing (Agger, 2012) in peoples' digital self-presentations, but little has been written on the absence of social information as missing identifiers (Goffman, 1963) or concerning disidentifiers.

1. Understanding missing identifiers
Signs may be called symbols where signs are available to convey social information that is frequently and steadily available and routinely sought and received (Goffman, 1963). In e-portfolio curation, students might be unable to add information to particular identifying categories. This could result in their online identities missing identifying information that audiences would typically expect in a showcase digital portfolio.
There is a research gap concerning audience expectations of teenagers' online disciplinary identities. However, research into professional branding (van der Land & Mutinga, 2014. Van der Land, Willemsen & Unkel, 2015. van der Land, Willemsen & Wilton, 2016) is suggestive of how profile creators might increase their credibility by making particular choices in the information they provide. For example, human resource departments might expect to see prospective employees' self-portraits on LinkedIn (Sharone, 2017) and users who post theirs are perceived to be more socially attractive and competent than ones who don't (Edwards, Stoll, Faculak & Carman, 2015). In such portraits, smiling and eye-contact (looking in the camera) appear to increase perceptions of credibility (van der Land, Willemsen & Wilton, 2016).

Digital self-presentation as an online exhibition 
Impression management is the term used to describe how a performer tweaks his or her performance to consciously give details or unintentionally give off details that leak off without any intention (Goffman, 1963). Notions of impression management have proved a useful theoretical foil for understanding online behavior (boyd, 2007. Marwick & boyd, 2011. Mendelson & Papacharissi, 2010. Lewis, Kaufman & Christakis, 2008. Quan-Haase & Collins, 2008. Schroeder, 2002. Tufekci, 2008). Goffman's dramaturgical metaphor situates impression management within a specific bounded place, drawing on the concept of a behaviour setting (Barker, 1968) in which behaviour is driven by the norms and goals of specific settings. This delimited place is distilled into a dichotomy between front- and back regions, colloquially front stage and back stage. In the front stage, the actor tries to present an idealised version of the self that accords to a specific role. In my research, pupils were assessed on their front stage self-presentation as visual arts students. Students' curations of digitally disciplined personas drew on varied repertoires from a backstage, where the real work necessary to keep up appearances is done.

Goffman's dramaturgical metaphor is focused on synchronous performance in a situation where the performer is co-present with a live audience and can adjust his or her behaviours in response to their feedback. However, many social media sites provide communicative situations that are dissimilar to face-to-face ones. These situations do not depend on being bounded in space and time, nor supporting co-present, real-time observation between individuals (Miller, 1995). Consequently, it is more appropriate to use an exhibition metaphor than a stage play (Hogan, 2010), for social media artefacts. E-portfolios, for example, are presented asynchronously in space for many possible audiences:

Hogan defines an exhibition site as a site (typically online) where people submit reproduced artifacts (read: data). These artifacts are held in storehouses (databases). Curators (algorithms designed by the site's maintainers) selectively bring artifacts out of storage for particular audiences. Audience in these spaces includes those who have used the artefact or make use of it. There are two components of an exhibition space; in the first, information signifying an individual is delivered to the audience on demand by a third party. In the second, the reproducibility of the content and the database curator's role in distributing it means that the submitter does not continually monitor the data as the audience receives it. Nor may the contributor fully know his or her invisible audience(s).

The exhibition metaphor is highly appropriate for describing visual arts showcase e-portfolios, since these are exhibitions that are doubly curated; being self-curated by students, who organise digital content, that is redistributed via the virtual curatorship of an online portfolio service's database(s). The context of this exhibition space can stand in for the dramaturgical context of a specific setting (Schroeder, 2002). In contrast to the latter situation, the artist and his exhibit's viewers are not co-present in space in real-time, but may still monitor and react to each other. Furthermore, while the artist may order artefacts with a particular audience in mind, those who view and react to the content may be different from those for whom it was intended. This exhibition approach expands, but does not replace, the dramaturgical approach since each artist may adjust his or her self-presentation on an ongoing basis in response to audience feedback. An advantage of this expanded approach is that it can support a clearer articulation of the potential and perils of self-presentation in an age of digital reproduction (Hogan, 2010).

The expanded approach is also helpful for addressing the major difference between an embodied actor with a pre-existing physical presence, versus the disembodied e-portfolio exhibition space. Its creators must enter, select and upload information to create their digital presences. In e-portfolio production, students should have greater opportunity to exercise impression management and make strategic choices in what information they might provide through different modes. These modes provide different resources that students can use to control their information and affect not just what young people are able to reveal, but also what they are able to conceal (Jones, 2005).

Linking missing information to marginalised students' limited infrastructural access
Software both enables and constrains users' communications (van Leeuwen & Djonov, 2013) through posing particular kinds of representational and communicational choices.  The degree of design and customisation afforded by Carbonmade, as well as what software does not offer users (van Leeuwen, 2008), shaped students' e-portfolio styles. For example, free Carbonmade users had very limited options for customising portfolio layout. Unlike paid users they cannot upload a custom logo or feature big images.

In curating online personas, few keen students would set out to produce digitally disciplined identities that were incomplete showcases, since this might potentially compromise their credibility. Nevertheless, for first-timers, the task of e-portfolio design work can be overwhelming (Yancey, 2004) as it may involve many unfamiliar tasks. These can include: identity work; remediation of creative productions and their arrangement for diverse online audiences; and being ‘web sensible’ in exploiting the affordances of the digital space (such as hyperlinks). While the on-going maintenance of e-portfolios may involve seemingly simple processes, their quantum contributes to it being a complicated medium for novices to manage. They often needed to do several updates for achieving currency and coherence.

Such a requirement placed marginalised students at the greatest disadvantage in being under-resourced in not having home computer and internet access. They had to make choices during e-portfolio lessons, where they were hampered by their inexperience with computers and the internet. Highly constrained access to digital information infrastructure limited these teens' development of a digital hexis for e-portfolio production. The concept of a digital hexis was proposed by Fanny Georges (2007) to designate a scheme of user self-representations. These self-representations are transformed like a body that is shaped by habit or by repetitive practice. Thus, the notion of hexis bears analogy with the shaping of meaning and body. The extent to which digital identities are produced is drawn from repetitive interactions and continuous perception of self-representations on the screen (Georges, 2009, p.1). Participants as e-portfolio curators, thus evidenced a digital hexis in their e-portfolio's self-description, imagery and level of organisation. These young people's accomplishments in evidencing digital hexeis via e-portfolio styles were thus closely linked to opportunities for regularly accessing and using digital information infrastructures.

In analysing all research participants' e-portfolio styles, different patterns between the two sites suggested that young people's material circumstances were reflected in the extent of their digital self-descriptions and portfolio organisation. In particular, inequalities in histories of digital infrastructure's access and use (for example "free" internet Wi-Fi) led to large differences in the levels of modal density (Norris, 2009) of e-portfolios at either site. Students’ multimodal texts can be dense in meaning, given that each mode adds its particular layer of complexity. According to a Multimodal (inter)action analysis approach (Norris, 2004, 2014), each students’ e-portfolio had a particular level of modal complexity. The more intricately intertwined a webpage’s multiple disembodied modes (such as image, text and layout), the higher the density. Differences in the densities of e-portfolios were linked to the digital hexis for e-portfolio curation that teens could exercise. Thus, class and digital divides were evident in the extent to which digital personas and imagery was curated.
Youth’s development of a digital hexis for e-portfolio curation benefitted from digital infrastructures available outside class: No independent school student lacked extra-mural internet access, but a few government school pupils did. Without such privilege, these students had to do e-portfolio work in class. Their inexperience with desktop computers and internet browser use often resulted in slower progress and needing to play ‘catch up’ in class with peers. Overall, students with the least internet access created e-portfolio styles that featured fewer roles and had a lower modal density than those of their peers. Such self-presentations and portfolios seemed to be hampered by absent information that reflected its curators not having the resources or time required for providing all the details that the e-portfolio curriculum requested. Consequently, marginalised students' e-portfolios seemed disorganised and less polished than affluent peers who benefitted from additional production periods outside class.

Written for UCT postgraduate Media Studies students interested in sharing their research projects online.

1. To an Online Community or Conference.

2. To an Open Access Journal.

3. To a Special Issue of a Journal.

4. To a Journal.

If you have any suggestions or concerns, please comment below, ta.

Written for researchers interested in students' social media practices, creative content production and how both can reflect indicators of the Connected Learning educational framework.

Cheryl Brown, Laura Czerniewicz and I wrote 'Online content creation. Looking at students' social media practices through a Connected Learning lens' for the Learning, Media and Technology journal. Our paper contributes to closing research gaps concerning: the Online Content Creation (OCC) practices of African university students; how indicators of the Connected Learning (CL) pedagogical framework are present in university students' non-formal creative productions; and the potential benefits that becoming digital creators might have for supporting students' social trajectories.

While previous studies have addressed creative production by university students for specific purposes, there is a research gap concerning OCC in the everyday lives of African university students. In analysing both the formal and informal ICT practices of 23 first year students at four South African universities, the use of online networks was pervasive. However, just three undergraduates described developing and/or using online presences to pursue interest-based activities.

We followed "Jake", "Vince" and "Odette" into their third year and learnt about: the social media they utilised; their trajectories; their linkages with career interests; and the types of online presences they created, maintained or discontinued. The pedagogical framework of CL proved an appropriate heuristic since all case studies spanned digital practices that, although non-formal, were: peer-supported (PS), interest-driven (ID) and academically oriented (AO). The cases also demonstrated the production-centred (PC) and shared-purpose (SP) of using openly networked (ON) new media for self-expression. PS, ID, AO, PC, SP and ON are all important indicators for CL.

There has been a tendency in CL literature to focus on secondary school youth, aged 12 to 18. We show how this emphasis can be extended to university, as students are likewise engaged in forming new interests and emergent social identities. By engaging in OCC, Jake, Vince and Odette could expand on the academic creative production interests they were formally taught. We describe how each student leveraged non-formal OCC practices for orientating towards new learning opportunities and social trajectories. Complementing these three student's formal production interests with rare OCC practices, seemed likely to give them an edge in our globally competitive society, as digital creators:

Jake used his productions as a student journalist, editor, poet and book writer to develop an online presence as a writer. He currently works as a communications trainee for a state agency. Vince's successful video production in an extra-curricular, online Ghetto Film School of LA course resulted in him being sponsored to present his short at the Sundance Film Festival Showcase. He currently works in multimedia and directs video-productions. Odette strategically developed separate online presences to promote her availability as an actor/model and scriptwriter. She also shares productions as a fiction writer, poet and personal journal diarist.

For more on African students' online content creation and social media use and how both reflected Connected Learning indicators, click on http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/SqgVIjCFNzhQsXx5TKRF/full.

Written for researchers and educators interested in the Connected Learning framework and extramural, online creative production by university students in the Global South.
In reviewing the evidence from 24 first-year university subjects, we found that four use online services predominately to pursue extra-mural creative production activities. These include: fiction and non- fiction writing; songwriting and singing; and film-making.  In drafting case studies it became evident that the use of online services from 2010 to 2013 by students enabled them to experience indicators from the Connected Learning learning framework (Ito et al, 2013). The Connected Learning (CL) framework was produced by the Digital Media and Learning Hub. It argues that learners flourish and achieve their potential when they can connect their interests and social engagement to academic studies, civic engagement, and career opportunity. Our paper shows how the varied online publication services used by two students, 'Odette' and 'Vince', provided them with inter-connected and relevant extramural experiences. As an approach to learning and design, research on the CL framework originally centered on secondary school learners in the U.S. and Great Britain. This paper reveals that a CL framework is also relevant for the extramural, online creative production activities of university students elsewhere in the world: