Written for Media Studies researchers interested in postgrad media students' pilot research projects and draft papers.

< Identity and self-presentation via mobile media >

+ Written primarily for researchers interested in the ethics of sharing young people's visual culture productions :



Background to my visual research ethics challenge.

1. An internet text search using text used in students’ self-descriptions under their About Us page; 
2. An internet text search using the folder titles shown by the screenshots (i.e., in Google, using <e-portfolio software name> + <folder title>); 
3. An internet search using the image titles shown in the screenshots (i.e. in Google, using <e-portfolio software name> + <image title>); 
4. An internet image search using the screen grabs (for example in 'Google Images');
5. An internet image search of the images inside the screenshots; 
6. In addition, location information and other information in the case studies and school backgrounds could be used in narrowing image and text searches.

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:

Written for Visual Arts students interested in digitising and publishing a comprehensive record of their artworks online and for the educators helping them.

The good news is that your Visual Arts educator has helped you to develop a showcase electronic learning portfolio (e-portfolio): in my research project, its two educators chose Carbonmade, because it met these criteria. The service suits the pedagogical aims in South African Visual Arts well, where a portfolio of 35 images is often more than sufficient to cover the learner's body of work for an end-of-year (matric) exhibition, as well as tertiary education applications.

The bad news is that the teachers' online portfolio choice seemed to learners to limit them to publishing 35 images online, thereby preventing the publication of their complete oeuvre! In response, an educator highlighted that learners are not limited to using Carbonmade and should consider creating presences with other services to publish the remainder of their artworks. Students could then create reciprocal links between these services to make them easy for Carbonmade's viewers to find; this is a common practice in the profiles of artists with featured portfolios. To help you identify a service you might want to use, I have listed the four commonly linked types, below:

1. An addition to the Social Network presence you already use 
(Popular examples: Facebook Pages and Google+)

The impressionist painter, Valérie Pirlot, provides links to many sites, which include online presences; her blog, Flickr account and a Facebook page, galleries; the Saatchi and Victoria Art, and an academy; the Royal West of England Academy.


The value of featuring all these links is that viewers can select specific aspects of her work that they are interested in viewing. It is also testifies to her professional status and the galleries and academy she associates with.

As a learner, you may already have a Facebook account and creating a Facebook page where you upload your artworks should have the benefits of being very convenient, whilst making it easy to share with your Facebook friends.

Valérie Pirlot's Facebook Page (8 March 2012)

Google account holders users should consider using Google+. If your digitized artworks are well-labelled, this may have the benefit of producing better ranked search engine results on the world's most popular search engine, relative to other services.

Leodor Selenier's Google+ page (8 March 2012)

2. A Photo Sharing Presence
(Popular examples: Flickr, Picasa)

1. There is a relatively high limit on the number of images that can be uploaded each month;
2. It includes a social networking component making it easy to share photos, comments and notes plus join groups you are interested in;
3. You could also upload videos;
4. It is compatible with many mobile phone applications, so easy to share to when using your phone's camera.

3. A Blog Presence
(Popular examples: Blogger and WordPress)

Marek Tarnawski's concise Carbonmade profile (8 March 2012)

Science fiction concept artist, Marek Tarnawski, provides a link to his blog http://farvus-craft.blogspot.com. His blog was created with Blogger, but you could consider using WordPress or other popular blogging software.

The benefit of choosing to blog for you could include:

1. There is no limit on the number of images that can be uploaded;
2. You could also upload other media (such as videos);
3. You can provide descriptions of your working process;
4. Viewers can choose to subscribe to your blog;
5. You can create reciprocal links with other blogs via a blogroll.

The biggest challenge of using a blog is the importance of writing well and being able to prioritise the time to publish content to it regularly. Before choosing to blog, please read the 1stwebdesigner article "Questions to consider before becoming a blogger". It can help you decide whether blogging is the right medium for you!

4. Another Online Portfolio Service Presence
(Popular examples: behance.net, cghub.com)

Carbonmade is just one of many other online portfolio software services focussed on enabling creatives to publish their online portfolios. Each service provides a distinct combination of affordances to cater for the type of creatives they serve; so it's important to define what you may need before selecting one.

For example, CGHub promotes itself as "an online community where computer graphics artists share their latest work, tips, and tools, network with friends, search jobs, and more." So, if you want to improve your computer graphics skills, this may be useful to join. However, if you want to interact with creative professionals outside of computer graphics illustration and want the best visibility of your online portfolio, you should consider using behance.net.

Nook's Carbonmade About page features a button that links to his portfolio on the Behance Network (14 March 2012)

I hope that this overview was useful for you. If there is a type of service I have missed, please mention it in the comment box below. Or if you have any other guidance, please do share. Thanks!

Written for academic researchers interested in improving their online presence.

Late last year, Laura Czerniewicz worked with Kelsey Wiens and I to review and improve Laura's online presence. This process involved three phases:

1. First, we audited her current online presences;
2. Second, we defined what she would like achieved;
3. Third, we actioned the most important aspects of this by developing her online presence guidelines and implementing a plan for each presence.

1 Audit of her current presence.
Searching for Laura online using the most common search engines (Google, Bing. et al.) showed her Twitter account, old UCT blog and a profile on CET's website. It also revealed that a few of her presentations had been uploaded to Slideshare by other people and an index of her research articles had been automatically generated on Academia.edu. This followed her publishing a profile there (and "forgetting about it, while it developed a life of its own" as she says). The latter was an example of a digital shadow; where an index of articles she had submitted to diverse journals over several years was dynamically created by an online service after her initial contribution.

@Czernie on Academia.edu (11 January, 2012)

2 Defining what she would like achieved.
The results of this audit were then combined with ideas on opportunities she could action to improve her digital identity's footprint (which she can pro-actively manage versus a digital shadow that is often a passive reflection of activities) in her online presence plan (generic version).

The most important aim Laura emphasised was that "coherence" should be achieved between her varied professional online presences. To achieve coherence, we developed a set of guidelines for her online identity. This covered; her name, personal and profile descriptions, tagline and the researcher keywords she would try to consistently use for her identity across all her presences.

Another important aim was improve the online visibility of her scholarly output. To support this, she committed to having an active online presence in the following areas; creating and publishing her academic profile and CV, blogging regularly, uploading showcase presentations, publishing micro-updates, sharing social bookmarks and submitting her blog's details to online directories and blog aggregators:

We had a in-depth discussion about the extent to which her professional identity should include a personal dimension. While I felt that she should include a personal hobby, she believes her online identity should be purely professional. Although we limited her presences to her academic and professional side, I still think that this is a pity; it limits the opportunity of her profile's viewers to understand her passion for craft and design and potentially discuss this with her...

Laura was very busy; even though she was very committed, she struggled to find time to fit this new project between her existing activities. An example of this was when I wrote the first draft of her identity's profile; Laura was very insistent that she should own her profile and re-wrote it. As a rule, I learnt that this is one task a post-graduate student should not be handed! Another challenge posed by Laura's time scarcity is that academia.edu indexed, but did not provide access to original documents. I'm hoping that Laura can find the time to upload these herself, despite it not currently being a high priority.


Presentation presence
Slideshare is a popular service for academics, and others, to share presentations. Laura had created an account long ago, but had forgotten her username since she had not been using it regularly. She was also concerned that previous uploads of her presentations were poorly tagged and hard to search for. To help, her http://www.slideshare.net/laura_Cz account's profile was improved and she uploaded recent presentations to it. She was pleasantly suprised when a presentation on Academic Visibility reached over 6,000 views, following it being featured on Slideshare's homepage!

Stats for this presentation on Slideshare.net (8 February, 2012)

Microblogging presence
For microblogging, Laura enjoys using Twitter and only tweets in her professional capacity. We had an interesting discussion on the extent of Laura's tweets and Kelsey suggested that a small percentage of these might feature personal interests. Laura has yet to be sold on the idea, however.

Social bookmarking presence
Laura started using Delicious at a time when it had huge news coverage because of the ownership change. She took the initiative to link her Twitter account to Delicious, which now automatically saves interesting URLs directly from her Twitter account.

Online directories and blog aggregation presence
Laura's blog was submitted to the Open Directory Project to improve its visibility. A blog aggregator, Amatomu, is next on Laura's list.

Other negotiations and considerations
Across all these services, the personal and professional line in social media was debated. While Laura is insistent that there is a clear line between the two (i.e. LinkedIn is for professional use, Facebook is personal), there are other UCT academics who use them (especially Facebook) as a joint space. It will be interesting to see whether Laura's views change...

The list of services above is a shortlist from what was considered and it was important for us to negotiate around the "lots that you can do" versus what is feasible. In particular, we defined the minimum that Laura was prepared to do for achieving her objectives.

As a busy academic, Laura also has a low tolerance for technical failure. In choosing services, we had to make sure they were easy-to-use and dependable; Laura would not spend time troubleshooting. Having clearly defined the low hanging fruit and most appropriate online services for Laura to use, we finished defining her online presence plan: each online publication she wanted was listed and a list of tasks and deadlines was defined for each.

Written for secondary and tertiary Visual Arts and Visual Design educators and decision makers.

The optimal process for a Visual Arts or Design educator to adopt Web 2.0 services (like social bookmarking and electronic learning portfolios) could involve these seven stages:

1. Personal experimentation with social network services;
2. Exploration of online services for curricular adoption;
3. Personal use of these services;
4. Achieving school management buy-in;
5. Introduction of online services in a curriculum;
6. Sustained adoption of these services in the syllabus;
7. Self-publication with other web2.0-based services.

Written for South African Visual Arts educators and decision-makers.

Eight requirements for optimal online portfolio adoption
My research into online portfolio software use in two secondary schools suggests that there are eight key requirements to meet before a school's Visual Arts educator(s) can optimally adopt online portfolios into a grade's syllabus:

1 What problem does my research address? 
There is a research gap regarding the multimodal choices that online portfolios afford, the choices that secondary school students make and the resonances of their choices. There is also a gap in describing how students negotiate with educators regarding choices the latter view as 'problematic'.

1.1 Who supports the presence of a problem?
David Buckingham (2003, 2007) argues that exposing students to media production in new school curricula can be a very effective form of media education. The new Visual Arts curricula that this Action Research project contributed to launching; “Create your own online portfolio” and “Improve your online portfolio” were intended to serve this aim.

In following these curricula, students made many multimodal choices in creating their online portfolios. Multimodal Theory, developed by Gunthar Kress (1996, 2010) and Carey Jewitt (2006, 2010), is highly appropriate for describing individual choices and their relationships; to each other, the page they help construct and other portfolio pages.  

Jewitt (2006) has used Yrjo Engstrom’s  (1987, 2001, 2005) Activity theory to explain the complex schooling context in which multimodal choices are made. Second generation Activity theory will be used to explain how the contradictions and tensions that result from a change to the traditional Visual Arts' classroom's 'tools', 'rules', 'division of labour' and 'community' in the new online portfolio activity system contributed to students negotiations with educators concerning 'problematic' choices.

2 How, where and when does the problem impact?
Although Buckingham’s body of research on media education (1990, 2007) suggests that teaching students media production is beneficial, there are few examples in the literature of these interventions by Visual Arts educators. There is also a research gap in students’ choices with online portfolio software.

By supporting successful initial curricular adoptions at a private (2010, 2011) and public (2011, 2012) school, this project enabled research into: select South African students’ multimodal choices with online portfolio software; their choices’ resonances; and uncovers how changes in creating an online portfolio as an adjunct to a traditional one contributed to students’ negotiations with educators regarding 'problematic' multimodal choices.

2.1 Who supports the impact of the problem?
Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear (2011) have also identified the importance of students being taught “new media literacies” through digital media production and describe the challenge of educators’ “outsider mindset” being an obstacle to digital media’s successful adoption. This project has helped Visual Arts educators to develop “insider mindsets” that are better suited to support the initial curricular adoptions of online portfolios.

Both the private and public school’s curricula support students with creating showcase Visual Arts electronic learning portfolios (e-portfolios). Barrett (2008) has written about the importance of educating students to use e-portfolios for life-long learning. She has also blogged on the decline in North American secondary schools’ adoption of e-portfolios (2010), listing many challenges that e-portfolio adoptions face.

Hazel Owen (2009) did an e-portfolio literature meta-review, which showed that although there are pedagogical benefits of e-portfolio use in well-resourced, tertiary environments, there are many hazards too. My research has supported secondary school educators with exploring the benefits and hazards of their Visual Arts students’ e-portfolio use as an adjunct to the traditional portfolio.

3 Why does the problem exist?
The conceptual basis for the problem is that online portfolios are a new cultural form; freemium Web2.0 services only emerged from 2003. Their novelty partly explains why so little research has been done into the multimodal choices they afford.

3.1 Who supports the conceptual nature of the problem?
There are distinct resourcing barriers confronting adoption of Information Communication Technology in tertiary education in the developing world: Laura Czernieciwz and Cheryl Brown (2004) identified four key resource categories; 'technological' (i.e. availability of ITC resources), 'personal', 'agency' (i.e. access to digitisation and computer equipment), 'contextual' (i.e. formal enabling networks) and 'online content' (i.e. articles written for local audiences) where barriers to adoption occur. These categories arguably apply in secondary education too, as it is a similar formal environment. 

My research project project has assisted two secondary school educators in overcoming some of these obstacles and has facilitated the curricular adoption of online portfolios for studying multimodal affordances, students’ selections, their choices’ resonances and uncovers the background to negotiations regarding 'problematic' choices.