Transforming Academic Identities

My presentation.

I used this session:

To introduce some basic concepts about academic identity

To set out some of the challenges for academic staff using learning technologies

To discuss what institutions are doing to engage staff in the use of learning technology

To describe how City University’s MAAP programme creates opportunities for staff to develop sustainable expertise in using learning technologies.

I introduced Castell’s ideas on the impact of technology on identity -:

1)      legitimizing identity introduced by dominant institutions of society to extend and rationalize their domination over social actors (administration, surveillance, compliance)

2)       resistance identity generated by actors in opposition to the logic of domination (blogs and wikis, extra- institutional CoPs)

3)       project identity produced by those who seek to build, around a project, a new identity that redefines their position

This last point led into a demonstration of how the TEAP module on our MAAP programme offers opportunities for staff to be able to develop projects in a supportive and evolving community of practice.

I offered  4 questions for discussion, on reflection this turned out to be three too many, but nevertheless there was engaged discussion and comment and I was approached by some of the audience afterwards to get more details of our TEAP module.