Week One Blog Review - Teachthought's Terry Heick and Digital Identities

Terry Heick is the founder and a contributor for Teachthought.com, a site that features weekly podcasts and frequent blog posts from a range of teachers and experts, investigating new trends and longstanding best practices in learning, teaching, technology, and critical thinking.

Mr. Heick, a former teacher, titled a recent post, "Generation Like:" When Students See Themselves as Digital First."

This piece begins as a philosophical status report, subtitled "The Quantification of a Person." At times polemical, at times fear-mongering, Heick makes reasonable but unsubstantiated assumptions about digital identity among contemporary students.  He explains wisely but without evidence that online social opportunities and games develop a separate and unreal identity among users that is potentially completely removed from the actual physical and social realities of the student.  This duality is problematic, and Heick claims it can lead to students' stronger associations with their non-real, other selves.  According to Heick, the otherness students experience in their online identities would be unfamiliar to a person living twenty years ago.  

Section two of the article, "Digital Identity is Packaged Identity," leans on Salon writer Susan Cox's article about Mark Zuckerberg's comments about the current state of identity.  Quoting her note that Facebook can be limiting and insulting as a commodified sense of self, Heist correctly identifies the identity as "accepted and created in equal amounts," and that contemporary learners are likely to have created themselves as digital beings as much as physical beings.

The closing section of this post, "A Digital-First Pattern of Identity," Heick argues that students do exist foremost as physical beings, but that their conscious sense of self is likely to exist online in a more intentional and orchestrated way.  The digital environment, wherein students can seem to have more control over how they are perceived, will be more comfortable to students for whom these previous assumptions are true.  As such, Heick concludes in an adroit analogy about learning to walk on ice, students with digital comfort will prefer digital reality over traditional, earlier-generation understandings of learning to work, play, and engage.  Implied throughout these rumination is the need for educators to admit to and adapt to the power of each students' digital self.

REVIEW -

While Mr. Heick has taken some interesting notions and brought them to an interesting conclusion in this piece, I was a bit put off by the universalism of his claims.  Especially insofar as his worldview assumes extreme digital engagement - namely, that a majority of students see themselves as principally digital beings - I worry that he's overemphasizing a digital reality among the students of his readers to a degree that I don't believe exists among the students that I encounter each year.  And although teaching English to me means keeping kids focused on traditional modes of learning, especially writing clearly and reading well, I do appreciate Heick's nuance attention to reaching students, and letting them work in realms that are familiar and increasingly important to each one's sense of self.