Pencil it in - thoughts on identity and permanence in relation to learning Monday, October 13, 2008

At the Technology and Technology-Practice: Re-shaping 21st Century Higher Education (Uni21HE) event last month (see http://carolshergold.blogspot.com/2008/09/thinking-spaces.html), one of the factors that helped me to get a lot out of the day was the plentiful provision of pencils ..

At the start of the event, we were asked to write down on a PostIt note an output that we wanted to get from the day. I wasn't really sure what I wanted to write, and using a pencil made it easier to be tentative, to try stuff out and then erase it.

A bit later on, I decided to join a group that was thinking about identity. And the thing that struck me most as we started our discussion, was the ease with which I had been able to write down and erase and then write down again using the pencil. But it's very hard to rub out the traces that we leave on the web. Many of us will have web sites and web services we've started using, abandoned, forgotten about, can no longer access the password for - and yet they come up when someone does a web search for your name.

So you start to realise that you're scribbling on your own name-space and leaving behind all kinds of identity detritus. And it can be really hard to do anything about it if you aren't happy with some of the traces you're left.

Human social behaviour can be a complicated dance between the anxiety of revealing something, and the desire to show it. Getting lost and being found are structurally important states. Here is Freud for example on the way his grandson was able to find a way to manage his anxiety about separation from his mother by playing a game with a cotton reel:

What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very
skilfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it
disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive
'o-o-o-o'. He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the
string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful 'da' ['there'].
This, then, was the complete game - disappearance and return.
[..] The interpretation of the game then became obvious. It
was related to the child's great cultural achievement -
the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual
satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go
away without protesting. He compensated himself for this, as it
were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the
objects within his reach.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle, Volume 18, Standard Edition

It seems that getting lost and being found might be important parts of a learning experience too. I lose my way, lose my place, lose my certainty. I find a new way to think about something. I let myself be seen not knowing in order to learn.

The key thing here is fluidity, and the ability to pose and retract.

The little boy's predicament was being lost. But the predicament I'm thinking about it the one of being found, when you didn't expect to be or necessarily want to be.

Web 2.0 systems offer us exciting environments for experimentation and for testing out fluid and changing ideas and identity. But paradoxically they can also raise the potential cost of experimenting by placing the outputs beyond individual control so that people discover they have written in indelible ink.

Image cropped from a photo in Flickr by viagallery.com licensed under a Creative Commons remix license