After engaging in discussions with students and their teachers, I’m getting the sense that digitally-native youth have an inherent awareness of online identity presentation that students their age a couple of years ago did not. I’ve already mentioned how middle school students make me feel old and dated in their use of digital tools, but I’m also starting to realize that today’s youth demonstrate a higher level of sophistication in terms of presenting themselves online.
I say this because I went through an archive of blogs, comments, and websites that I and my friends created just a mere eight years ago. I did this with the purpose of comparing how middle school school students a couple of years back presented themselves online, versus how current students present themselves today. Though I cannot post examples of work from the students that I spoke to on this blog, I have summarized the information that I gleaned from them.
Here is a sample of the way in which I expressed my own online identity at the age the students that I spoke to:
Here is a comment on the site left by one of my peers:
Though the content material seems to be the same (friends, family, boys, pop trends), the way in which students write now suggests a level of sophistication that my own “txt language” does not. Though I was educated to write properly at an international school, I recall the thinking process I undertook in producing incorrect words as this was how I was taught to “write online” to come off as “cool” to my peers. Though this might be a mere reflection of the trends during this time, I did not expect my college-age self (or anyone else really) to be reading this material.
But in contrast to my ignorance about online writing at that age, current students at School One demonstrate a sophisticated level of thinking with regards to the creation of their online identities. The students that I talked to would never put up a post like the example up top. They are aware of their audience; they know that their parents, further college peers/professors/employers, and current teachers have access to whatever they put online. They are also aware of the permanence of whatever they put on a blog or social network. Though (for the most part) they still seek to present themselves in a light that reflects well on them socially, they already know the basics of how to create and curate an identity that presents them in a positive light.
Though I’m in the process of thinking about how to examine this idea further, I think that we need to reconsider the way in which we teach students about their online identities. It seems as though we’re constantly telling students things they already know, and using lessons learned from previous generations that were not as well-versed as current students are now.