Brains working towards machine consciousness

This Is Me is an Eduserv funded project to design learning materials to help with education about forming, maintaining and securing your personal identity on the web, otherwise known as their Digital Identity (DI). The initial stages involve collecting people's stories about DI, whether cautionary, advisory, entertaining or just plain educational.

As we enter a phase of internet use where employers are searching for people online, and using the information they gain to help the decision making process when hiring (and firing), and people are in a position to easily publish information about themselves, it is becoming increasingly important to have the skills to manage the information about you, and to direct people to the view of that information which best fits the context in which they might be looking. Some people have common names, and it will be important to them to be able to direct others to find the right set of information. Others may have widely differing roles, and have some information which is just not relevant to some categories of searcher which they might prefer to direct attention away from. All of us benefit from being able to get a picture of what others will see relating to us, so we know what image we are portraying to the outside world.

Your Digital Identity is not only made up of material which you publish on the net, of course, but also comprises information which others have posted about you. As people experiment with different services, the material they post becomes distributed across multiple systems - keeping track of this is hard enough for some people, but it becomes much harder when you try to keep track of anything which might have been said about you.

In a world where people may start to use Connectivism as a theory of learning, where people learn from each other as much as from formal institutions, the online reputation of people starts to matter more. What does your Digital Identity say about you? Are you happy with it? Does it say the sorts of things you want to convey about yourself? If you are a CCK08 learner, does your DI encourage others to connect with you, and thus strengthen your network, or does it undermine it?

Currently in its (very) early stages, I have a site for building a community around Digital Identity, and for starting to collect stories about it. It uses the Elgg platform, which provides a fairly nice privacy model.

Minimising spam is going to be an issue with the current set up, but I would be very happy if people want to come and make positive contributions by signing up to the site and leaving a story about DI there. Maybe you have discovered someone else has posted photos of you that you would rather had not been seen in public, or maybe you have information on a social networking site which would be better off private? If you are an employer, perhaps you could let us know what sort of things would put you off employing someone?

The site needs a decent URL, but at the moment it can be found at http://thisisme.sis06pp.webs.sse.reading.ac.uk