In the morning, we were asked to interrogate what has been characterised as the three ‘realms’ of the Library Domain: Corporation, Channels, and Clients. (For more explanation of this model, see the TILE project report on the Library Domain Model).   My groups were responsible for picking apart the ‘Channel’ realm definition:

The Channel – a means of delivering knowledge assets to Clients, not necessarily restricted to the holdings or the client base of any particular Corporation, Channels within this model range from local OPACs to national JISC services and ‘webscale’ services such as Amazon and Google Scholar. Operators of channel services will typically require corporate processes (e.g. a library managing its collection, an online book store managing its stock). However, there may be an increasing tendency towards separation, channels relying on the corporate services of others and vice versa (e.g. a library exposing its records to channels such as Google or Liblime, a bookshop outsourcing some of its channel services to the Amazon marketplace).

In subsequent discussion, we came up with the following key points:

• This definition of ‘channel’ was too library-centric. We need to working on ‘decentring’ our perspective in this regard.

• We will see an increasing uncoupling of channels from content.  We won’t be pointing users to content/data but rather data/content will be pushed to users via a plethora of alternative channels

• Users will increasingly expect this type of content delivery.  Some of these channels we can predict (VLEs, Google, etc) and others we cannot.   We need to learn to live with that uncertainty (for now, at least).

• There will be an increasing number of ‘mashed’ channels –  a recombining data from different channels into new bespoke/2.0 interfaces.

• The lines between the realms are already blurring, with users becoming corporations and channels….etc., etc.

• We need more fundamental rethinking of the OPAC as the primary delivery channel for library data.  It is simply one channel, serving specific use-cases and business process within the library domain.

• Control.  This was a big one. In this environment libraries increasingly devolve control of the channels via which their ‘clients’ use to access the data. What are the risks and opportunities to be explored around this decreasing level of control? What related business cases already exist, and what new business models need to evolve?

• How are our current ‘traditional’ channels actually being used? How many times are librarians re-inventing the wheel when it comes to creating the channels of e-resource or subject specialist resource pages? We need to understand this in broad scale.

• Do we understand the ways in which the channels libraries currently control and create might add value in expected and unexpected ways?  There was a general sense that we know very little in this regard.

There’s a lot more to say about the day’s proceedings, but the above points give a pretty good glimpse into the  general tenor of the day.   I’m now interested to see what use JISC intends to make of these outputs.  The ‘what next?’ question now hangs rather heavily.

(a version of this also posted at the Copac Development Blog)

“The important point is that learners (and staff) will come into institutions with an existing identity, they will increasingly expect to use that identity while they are there (particularly in their use of services ‘outside’ the institution) and that they will continue using it after they have left.”

It therefore logically follows that the challenge is around building solutions that allow this kind of portability, ideally a flexible one.

Since there have been theories about the web, there have been theories of subjectivity around how the web would both make apparent and facilitate the constructed and multiple nature of identity. Web 2.0, it follows, is simply an example of this postmodern ‘prophesy’ writ large.  Cultural conjecture aside, I do find the recent conversations around practically ‘centralising’ one’s web presence on the network level interesting on a couple of levels (Lorcan Dempsey wrote about this only yesterday).  They gave me pause to reflect on my own  ‘identity management’ (and potential lackthereof) and its relation to my subjectivity, and particularly my mediated ‘digital’ selves.

First, I am struck by how impossible (or desirable) it might be to ‘centralise’ online identity — and this is not about whether such centralisation is technically feasible or not.  I suppose I am what could be termed a digital native, possessing multiple online presences/i.ds for quite a few years now.  This multiplicity produces some real tensions.  This blog itself is a good example of this. I started it three years ago when I realised that I needed another voice, a separate space from a ‘personal’ blog that was becoming increasingly academic and ‘meta’ in its reflections about blogging and what it might all mean.  The old posts below reflect me trying to work through this disjuncture.

The fact that I did not keep up the blog is in part to do with the massive life change I was about to undertake (moving my family from America to the UK) but probably more because this particular written identity was less comfortable and more risky for me, and I was less sure of my audience.  Ironically, upon moving to the UK, my ‘personal’ blog suffered a similar crisis of faith, as I realised that that particular voice was bound up in a different cultural identity.  This sounds rather handwringing, but the fact is that the blogging community I was part of was largely educated North American women, who shared my views about the tyranny of parenting manuals, breast pumps, and Good Housekeeping.  When I moved back ‘home’ I felt completely ripped from this context, and the blog dwindled as a result. (That, along with taking on the most demanding job of my career).

Right now I have a relatively established identity on twitter, which foregrounds my professional role (and has proven an invaluable networking tool already) but is also sometimes a space for that lost personal voice (Within reason. My boss follows me, after all, but so far he’s not called me to the carpet for anything).  Although I now feel more comfortable and ‘authentic’ in that voice,  issues of audience and which ‘identity’ I am enacting at a given moment still elicit crises of confidence every so often.

The ‘decentredness’ that we might be trying to overcome might not adequately take into account the fact that identity is always already multiple, constructed and mediated through the various spaces in which we enact them.   I emphasise the term multiple over fractured, as the latter suggests a certain ‘brokenness,’ which might be more useful when considering how a particular instance of one’s identity (a professional one, for instance) could be fused back together.  (Lorcan wrote about precisely this act of fusing identities).

Multiplicity suggests different selves in different spaces, and this brings me back to digital literacy and JISC ‘Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World’ report.  I agree with Andy that identity management should be addressed as an issue for digital literacy, and indeed the report suggests that while students are not literate in terms of critical skills in information seeking and evaluation, they are literate in terms of understanding the boundaries of webspaces. “Using web 2.0 technologies leads to a new sense of communities of interest and networks, and also a clear notion of boundaries in web space” (6).   The report does not explicitly connect this with issues of online identity, but I do think we can extract from this point that students understand how to ‘be’ in online spaces, and that being will shift and change according to the rhetorical context of the space — the fact that discomfort over tutorial presence in social spaces is indicative that students are intuitively aware that the context is not right –  another identity is required.

Web 2.0 foregrounds how our different identities are mediated in different contexts.  Students are likely more savvy about this rhetorical fluidity than many of their tutors.   This is rich territory from an e-pedagogy standpoint, and a starting point for discussions about rhetoric and what online ‘being’ actually means (and I’d agree that this might need a reimagining of what ‘information literacy’ might actually mean).

Ultimately, I’d agree with Lorcan’s final point yesterday, that while we consider how we make our identities more portable online in a flexible way,  “we also retain the ability to support decentralised identities which may not know very much, or anything, about each other “

Digital humanities scholarship needs to more adequately consider issue of scale before embarking.  How can the value of the project scale to other areas (for instance, a medieval research project scale to museum sector?) (He also discusses how the tackling of large-scale datasets itself transforms what is meant by ‘scholarship’)  Critical to this scalability is the requirement to build interoperable,  or what he refers to as ”ecunemical,” systems:

This step alone, however, cannot assure a truly collaborative environment. If digital projects have not been able to interact more effectively, it is in large measure because they remain proprietary to a sub-discipline.To encourage other projects and their organisers to see the advantage of collaboration, scholars should look beyond the specificity of their topic to the larger rubric under which both may be subsumed. In short, we need to change our thinking when conceiving scholarly projects.

According to Nichols, all this means taking a ‘use-agnostic’ approach to designing digital scholarship projects.   This notion of ‘use-agnosticism’ runs against the grain of everything I’ve been thinking and reading lately — that developments need to be use-case as opposed to ‘tools’ led. Context and task must drive development and functionality.  And I think Nichols would agree.  Perhaps a better way to think about ‘use-agnosticism’ is less a disregard for use case, but instead a more macro (as opposed to micro) view of use-case.   Development must be use-case driven, but how can that use-case be imagined beyond the domain of a particular project (i.e. beyond the work of a Medieval history researcher, and to the domain of the museum curator, visitor, or teacher?)

Next month I’ll be chairing the session ‘Looking Into The Future - What is the impact of user generated content on research and scholarship?’ at the JISC Digital Content Conference.  I think this issue of scale and the challenge of the ‘silo’ oriented approach will be key points for discussion.

So beyond asserting ”it is impossible to define web 2.0″ what questions can we ask about how the term comes to have resonance and serve as a motivational force within certain rhetorical contexts?  Although I am still working through the issues, I want to begin to begin to articulate some of my own responses to various attempts to pin down this thing that is “web 2.0.” What motivates these definitions or (mis?)usages of the term?

One of the most dominant themes is that as version two, web 2.0 is not only an improvement of, but also in many contexts framed as something that is avowedly not web 1.0.  It is something new, and definitions of the new form will typically list how and by what means this new technological form performs differently to its aging relative.  Here, Web 1.0, with its largely static pages, its privileging of “traditional” forms of publication and communications, conventional cataloging and metadata systems is cast as somewhat retrograde and unmalleable antecedent, even foil, to the infinitely more flexible, democratic, open, and user-centered promise of web 2.0 technologies.   It’s this epochal (if sometimes implicit) tendency to define Web 2.0 in opposition to a so-called bygone era of “Web 1.0″ that I am most interested in.

Judy O’Donnell’s recent post over her frustration with her academic advisors stands as a good example of how the concept is very much one in (vexed) negotiation right now, and highlights the very material consequences that emerge from such misconceptions.   For her, the fact that Ph.D. advisors have assigned readings for her program that are out of step with contemporary discourse about learning in web 2.0 environments is indicative of what she calls “web 1.0 thinking”:

Here is an example – the reader for Learning Environements, which I must read (ok, I can do that) but which I also have to demonstrate that I understand (!) contains 16 papers, all from the 90s, and one only from 2001. Now you and I know that this represents Web 1.0 generation of thinkers. Even if they are ‘cool constructivist thinkers’, they are talking about a learning environment and learning landscape that is rapidly becoming irrelevant. While it is important to ground current research and learning in past knowledge and research – I do not have this option.

She is told: ”You can add a bit on about Web 2.0 if you like, but do not make it the main thrust of your paper. You must demonstrate that you understand our philosophy.”  

This, for a student who has opted to focus on Web 2.0 as a topic, is understandably a real blow, and she is now forced to think about changing institutions and programs.  Stephen Downes own wry comment on the matter is that “we must be on to something if education doctoral programs are advising that students should not focus on web 2.0.”  Certainly, I agree, and empathize wholeheartedly and from experience with O’Donnell’s concerns here.  I see a lot of buzz and a lot of misunderstanding over “web 2.0″ or the “read/write” web.  People–especially academic administrators–know that “blogging” and “podcasts” and “social networking systems” are the next big thing, but just what those things are, and why they signify something new for education is not necessarily clear.  In my work, I spend a lot of time explaining how new technologies we develop can enrich learner’s experiences and transform pedagogy, but in the end, technology is not enough–and this is sometimes the hardest part to communicate to academics and educators who see us as the responsible (and accountable) “experts” on these matters.A “web 2.0″ technology does not necessarily a “Web 2.0, transformative, constructivist learning environment” make.  All the collaborative/interactive technologies in the world, will not necessarily render an online course instantly more “connectivist” or “constructivist” in approach. For instance, how much will students become “active” learners when traditional lectures are available to user both IRL or via a downloadable podcast? The answer depends on what the students do (or are required to do) with that lecture download–just as much as it depended on what they would do before, during and after a lecture on the “old days.”  Certainly technology can faciliate a shift in pedagogy, but not automatically form the basis of that shift.Another example is the University of Pennsylvania’s move to have students create Academic Blogs as part of the admissions process.  If universities require students create a private blog where comments are switched off and audience comprises only of the advisors and university officials who screen an application, then why a blog? Why not a personal essay done in a word processor and an electronic dropbox? Why does the rhetorical context here call for a blog?

 While I cannot comment on O’ Donnell’s specific case, I do wonder if the rejection of Web 2.0 as a motivational term in her work is less about a rejection of “Web 2.0″ as a theoretical/pedagogical premise (a rejection of the online pedagogical principles laid out so usefully by Stephen Downes and George Siemens and others) and more about a fundamental miscommunication over what Web 2.0 might mean.  Is the sweeping of Web 2.0 under the carpet in this case (and others) really about conserative “Web 1.0″ thinking, or more about a tendency to read the meaning of “web 2.0″ off the instrumental technologies that appear to make web 2.0 possible? 

In other words, is there a tendency to think that web 2.0 is can only be defined in regards to the technologies that appear to make this thing we call Web 2.0 possible? And why would this be a problem anyway?

Certainly, the first coining of the term by O’Reilly in 2004, provides us with what looks like useful metric for discerning the difference between “old” and “new” web:

As Paul Graham points out, this initial usage was less about proposing a “new version” of the web, but more about inventing a new catchy term that would suggest–in light of WWW fatigue and the dot.com slump–that something new was in the offing: “They just wanted to make the point that the web mattered again. It was a kind of semantic deficit spending: they knew new things were coming, and the “2.0″ referred to whatever those might turn out to be.” 

Much of the epochal and celebratory (and conservative) rhetoric surrounding “web 2.0″ is at times disconcertingly familiar. In the mid nineties, we were doing exactly the same thing–but this time, “the web” was pit up against a series of “non digital” foe.  Within a lot of the early theories of “cyberspace” (Turkle, Rheingold, Stone, Mitchell, to name just a few) the drama of the new, the revolutionary, and the subversive was played out in contrast to an former, more traditional and less progressive time.  Belonging to this former period are the outmoded cultural artifacts of the book, the narrative film, the chemically produced photograph, all antiques of a pre-hypertextual era where knowledge was physically contained or delimited in discrete forms, where we were “led” through the narrative as passive consumers.  Now, as users, we were immersed in an “interactive” culture that, apparently, transformed us from couch potatoes to agents in the construction of our own multiple narratives and identities.  

Here the meaning of the “new digital age” was read off the technologies in question, and so for all the celebration (or commiseration) that herein lay the epistemological shift to define an era, the theories still participated in the dominant progressivist narrative of scientific and technological “evolution.”  Here, and arguably now, the major claim was that formerly antiquated modes of cultural production lacked the essential characteristics of digital representation, which privileged indeterminacy, multiplicity and “laid bare” the heretofore mystificatory and naturalized processes of meaning-making.   Often glossed or ignored in these accounts of the inherent interactivity and “writerliness” of digital imaging is how all such interaction or communication takes place within specific given conditions and institutional structures.  

While I do not want to suggest that Web 2.0 was/is an empty term, or set its usage up as a strawman to show how we are committing all the same errors, what I am interested in is how and for what purposes Web 1.0 becomes the defining “other” or “outside” to web 2.0.  It is this gesture I think we need to be careful of, even while we usefully galvanize the theoretical concept of Web 2.0.  As a scholar with a cultural studies bent, I see Web 2.0 less as a revolution in technology than as an acceleration of an already-occuring epistemological shift triggered by modernity.  Just when this shift was triggered is obviously up for debate, but just as the “dawning of a digital age” did not mean a turn away from “passive” modes of consumption and production, nor does web 2.0 signal a break from conventional and intractable forms of an older, flat, world wide web.  

Just how transformative, constructivist, democratic, and new Web 2.0 is depends on the specific and material contexts of its uses (and how, in turn, we read them).  As I’ve mentioned before, “mommyblogging” for me is an instance of this potential transformation; but on the other hand, it is also an instance where largely white and middle-classed western women get to write the stories of “motherhood.”   ”Blogging” is not instrinsically radical or democratic–far from it.  But does it signal some shifts in forms of communication and the distribution of representative power?  In many specific, material contexts yes. (and also no).

So, on one level “web 2.0″ for me is not a useful phrase, for it suggests a breaking away from something by means of new technologies that is not necessarily the case.  On the other hand, as a term to usefully describe this ongoing shift, this ongoing turn to new forms of communication and of being, then at this moment in time, web 2.0 is doing its job.  As long as we remain grounded in the address of situated contexts of usage. The term is usefully bringing critical theoretical and social issues back to the forefront, and once again highlighting that change–however slow, however uneven–is afoot. And for that, it is very useful.

Jordan’s rhetorical approach to the event and its aftermath uncovers a much more complex discourse about the nature of “trust” and identity in online spaces emerging in the blog posts and comments that followed the revelation. This was a discourse that at once articulated and moved beyond the polarized positioning of the “blogosphere” as an intrinsically “safe” or “unsafe” location, and identity as “authentic” or “fake.”

Dialogic tensions between self/other and persona/community drive online community interactions and establish the trust that binds members together. They also reveal the extent of the dilemma faced by community members when they suspect one of their own of being a hoaxer. If their suspicions are confirmed, they face the potential loss of not just an individual community member, but of the foundation of the community itself. If identity is dialogic, then a hoax implicates all community members, even if only marginally, as it was their mutual acceptance of the fraudulent persona that allowed the hoax to succeed (205).

Jordan’s methodology is useful for thinking about the rhetorical practices that define specific online communities (whether academics, teens, mothers, educators, learners etc) and contributes to a new research trajectory that asks that we look not at “Computer Mediated Communication” as a whole, or even “blogs” and algorithmic measurements of “social network rankings” in monolithic and reductive terms, but instead direct attention also to communities of practice, and specifically the rhetorical strategies through which communities/identities emerge. (note–the article is appearing in a special issue of SCJ that calls for new interdisciplinary trajectories in computer-mediated communication research, which, it argues, has too long been dominated by monolithic and systemic approaches to CMC).

The issue of trust is of specific interest to me here, because in the mommyblogosphere of late there has been much discussion of the “dark side” of blogging, and specifically the way in which the community’s petty hierarchies and competitive forces are casting a shadow over the whole enterprise for many. Trust has been violated. Feelings have been hurt. When the issues of technorati-rankings and “blogging for pay” come into the picture, the way in which we look at how the community works and sustains itself becomes much more complicated. For instance–when does networking/commenting become viewed as an overtly “self-serving” venture?

My own thoughts about gender and blogging of late have been largely positive (see post above)–I have dwelled on the communal, productive aspect of blogging, and how these texts can be viewed as an alternative counter-discourse to the master narratives of “parenting” “motherhood” and gender–a feminist, transformative discourse; “mommyblogging as a radical act“. And I stand by this overarching thesis, but I do not want to simplistically contribute to the “celebratory” rhetoric surrounding blogging and gender. The profound ambivalence articulate by many MBs of late points precisely to how much identity is implicated, and dialogically constructed through the community.

And here I confront my own related ethical dilemma–do I link to these posts here as “evidence” in my academic blog, and risk undermining the trust I have established as a “mommyblogger?” it would make my points more compelling. As a literary scholar I freely quote and attribute “texts” written by individuals, but as a blogger within a community, to treat blog posts from that network as mere evidentiary “texts” makes me less comfortable. This stems from my positioning as both a researcher (and observer) and an active participant of the community I am discussing. Do I want to turn my cohorts into objects for critical investigation? Is this a violation of trust?

Though the context I am begining to examine–that of the phenomenon of “mommy-blogging” in Northern America–is significantly different, much of the argumentation here is applicable.  While for now I will to defer the question over whether these blog spaces represent subjects of a different “cyborgian” ontology, as a metaphor, like Bhaba’s notion of hybridity, the cyborg is a useful tool for thinking about the “in-betweenness” of online identities and writing spaces. 

We can say that in this context, mommy-blogs are “in-between spaces [that] provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood–singular or communal–that initiate new signs of identity and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself” (Location 1-2).  Mommy-bloggers articulate and construct the (contested) meanings of “motherhood” through the process of writing and interaction. 

In all their ideological messiness, contradictoriness, Mommy-blogs–even the discussions over ”definitions” of “mommy-blogging”–can be perceived as spaces of resistance (explicit and implicit) where women discuss, argue, and playfully subvert dominant images and ideologies concerning motherhood, and so begin to articulate new truths about the identity of ”mom.”   These writers are woven into the fabric of what Hawisher and Sullivan refer to as an “international feminist cyberquilt that can be a transformative global force in the global settings in which we work and live.