The conference “Digital Content Creation: Creativity, competence, critique” is hosted by Dream at the University of Southern Denmark. The following is the abstract for a paper, I have had accepted:
Abstract
Self-representation is becoming a prerequisite for success in modern life. Professionals have to be able to “show and tell” their competences, and make them plausible by showing examples – perhaps to a larger extent than actually having them. Self-representation is often done in the medium of a portfolio, which more and more often is created digitally and placed online.
In schools and universities the curriculum is to a larger and larger extent being “shadowed” by a programme, wherein pupils and students have to reflect on their learning in a “learning portfolio”. This is also done digitally – thus becoming digital content creation. This activity is set in motion by the teachers, and often done in accordance with rules and terms of assessment.
At the same time a whole generation of youngsters is creating digital self-representing content voluntarily in social software environments like FaceBook, MySpace etc. This content is seldom linked to the practises of self-representation in the schools – and deals more with creating self images than with displaying learning.
None the less learning is happening in these circumstances as well. On a very basic level the use of the social software has to be mastered in itself – but more importantly the way you represent yourself is in a very subtle way learned through observation of how other people represent themselves. The purpose of self-representation within the social software is to relate to others – you create a profile to connect, so your audience is not only your teacher or assessor but your friends.
This article intends to correlate learning e-portfolios with the learning that takes place within social software environments, by showing examples of undergraduate students’ self-representations in both circumstances. The purpose is to suggest a way in which learning institutions might benefit from a double strategy: Firstly through employment of a programme of learning e-portfolios to enable and empower the pupils/students as learners. In the literature on e-portfolios one of the main conclusions is that reflecting on learning enables the learner to understand and appreciate own competences. Secondly the strategy is through dealing with self-representation in social software to enable the student to establish relations and to gain knowledge of his or her own competences in creating and maintaining relations.
The article will finish by exhibiting an example of a double programme as described above at a programme for Multimedia Designers at Tietgen Business College and Odense Technical College.
