Identity Management Project

The project itself ended in May of 2011. 

The project began in October meeting with 20 teachers of Career Education. This was a one day workshop introducing the idea of digital portfolios as well as citizenship and managing of their online content. We then began work with 4 teachers on the specifics of this project including the domain name aspect. We provided an initial session with students introducing the project and inviting them to consider artifacts and ideas for including in their portfolios. We returned 2-3 times to these classrooms to support them. 

We began working with 4 teachers and 80 students.  Due to an illness, one teacher had to withdraw from the project and another teacher struggled since she only had the students for the first semester. Each student had to agree to receiving a domain as well as their parents approval.  In the end, we registered 27 students with domains. 

The project might be deemed successful in terms of providing students with a personal domain. There were a few technical aspects that had to be dealt with so there was some learning there for sure. The students themselves all experienced a much more thoughtful look at the idea of portfolios and identity. Some had never done portfolios of any time, others had never done anything digitally and none had ever considered the idea of a personal domain. 

The project was less than successful in terms of implementation. The challenge of working over 2 semesters was difficult. Our original vision was to make it a year long process embedded into either Career Education or in some cases English Language Arts. Our team could have provided more support for teachers and worked to find more ways to embed the work into curriculum. The real struggle was in helping students see value in an online space. Many had difficulty thinking about what they might share. In some cases, the teachers had specific items or headings for them to consider but our goal was to empower students to make it their own. We wanted them to include Facebook and other social spaces into their portfolio. Again, the challenge for them to see these spaces in any way beyond social was difficult. The fact that most of these students were graduating or within a year of graduating and they still struggled with their own identity was surprising to me. Perhaps it shouldn't have been. The design process for many was difficult. I would have done well do bring in someone with some specific design skills. We did spend some time in each session looking at exemplars but likely could have done more. 

I've had several people ask about the project and while the concept I think is still important I would have done things differently. I likely would have chosen to work with fewer teachers, perhaps only 1 or 2 and been sure to work more closely with the idea of identity. While there are many examples of students who have done this on their own, it's still a foreign concept to most teenagers and adults. The teachers struggled with the process too. I also think that the teachers should have been required to build along side. Experience the process with the students and learned with them. 

As with many projects I've proposed, there are always snags and details that I fail to consider.

My plan was to have students create portfolios inside PrairieSouth.ca. When they were ready, I'd simply given them their domain names and the domains would then point to their portfolios. Seemed like a good plan. However, I failed to check with our IT department earlier because since our domain is under CNET, we do not control our DNS and thus cannot have multiple domains. If that sentence makes no sense to you, and I may not even have explained it correctly, the bottom line is my plan wouldn't work and I needed to find a space for our sites to be hosted.

After several discussions with our IT department and others, I ended up purchasing 3 years of hosting through Bluehost. I've used Bluehost personally for 3 years and are very happy with them and I feel comfortable administrating the sites with them. The IT department graciously offered to help manage and support the site. So the plan is now to have students export their blogs and import them into bluehost. I'll likely use a subdomain of this site, identitymanagmentproject.com at first and once their domain names are established, sometime in early March, I'll repoint them to their domains.

Thankfully I work with a very supportive IT department who accepts my crazy, half-thought out ideas and figures out how to make it work in spite of me.

 photo credit: markomni

The second meeting with students was about getting down to the nitty gritty. We began exploring some of the sites that students had submitted as potential exemplars. We had some good discussions about web design as well as representation of character. The challenge for many is they don’t feel they have any discrete skills or interests that are worth showcasing. We tried to help them realize that it’s important for them to find ways to tell great stories about themselves. Certainly one session was not going to resolve that issue but it hopefully will be a lingering concept for them to ponder.

Next we had them set up their blogs. We are using our own installation of WordPress as an initial stage. Some students did explore the use of Google sites as well. We weren’t opposed to them using any space but since we felt more comfortable supporting WordPress, we encouraged students to stick with it. As site admin, I was able to add any plugins or themes the students wanted so they spent a fair bit of time in this session choosing a theme to represent themselves.

We left them with the task of populating their sites with some content using a variety of headings and categories to organize their spaces.

Our first session with the 5 classrooms was to create an overview and awareness of the the concept of identity and have students begin to consider the positive implications as well as how they may need to resolve and understand the relationship of all the spaces and places they frequent online. Given we are working with 3 senior classes and 2 grade 9 classes, the difference in understanding this varies. The senior classes were quickly beginning to think about how an online portfolio may be of value to them and many already had very specific ideas of how that might look. I was surprised that very few, if any had been using spaces outside of Facebook to post and create content.

The second goal of the first session was to have then think about what they might place in their portfolios but also why and how. Some had done hard copy portfolios but we all recognized that it was a simple transfer of content. Good discussions about design, tone, personalization and presentation helped students begin thinking about their space. We left them with the assignment of finding good examples of either online portfolios or design elements that may want to include in their own portfolios. They submitted these via Google Forms and would provide the fodder for the beginning of session #2.

Below is the slidedeck used in our opening session.

While the main part of the project is to focus on individual classrooms, we did want to make an open invitation to all teachers of career education to consider both the idea of digital identity as well as the use of portfolios. This is where we wanted to get everyone thinking along the same lines about digital citizenship but also allow teachers to choose whether they wanted to focus on having students create digital portfolios that included school and academic assignments or if they would simply act as a personal collection more in line with a resume. These discussions allowed teachers to begin thinking about the use of various tools in ways that made sense to them.

We met with about 20 teachers on October 19th. We also included our Assessment Consultant, David Hall to help those teachers better understand the role of the portfolios as assessment tools. Many explored various tools including blogs, wikis, videos and presentation software as ways for students to showcase and organize work. Participants created this shared document on a number of ideas and links that were discussed.

We plan to followup with teachers in April of 2011 to discuss their work and progress and consider ways to improve and fine tune the process.

The idea of applying for such a project began in the spring 0f 2010. The need for students to understand identity and digital footprints has been an ongoing pursuit in our division for several years. At best, it gets taught sporadically at worst, it’s not addressed at all. At the same time, we’ve done reasonably well in supporting teachers help students build digital portfolios from as early as grade one.

Discussions between curriculum and our Career and Work Experience have been ongoing as these two departments overlap and require a close working relationship. With the Ministry of Saskatchewan offering grants for Career Education related projects, this seemed like a good opportunity to give it a go. With that, we submitted the proposal and received word in June that our project was accepted.

Now on to the real work of making it happen….