So, Frances Bell asks on Twitter, “How do you present multiple facets of your identity on your site?” Her query prompted a number of really interesting responses – she’s gathered some of them here. Then she asks further, “How is professional identity conceptualised in education?” And how might our presentations of identity online be marked by gender?
Like Frances, I am an independent scholar, unaffiliated with any institution or organization. My personal websites are not simply where my work is showcased; they are my work. Also, hello. We're "women in tech." We're marked as such.
When I revamped my website over the holidays, I spent a lot of time thinking about how I wanted to present myself, my work.
Re-Thinking the Blog
I’ve felt for a while now that “blog” doesn’t really describe what I do (and not simply because it remains, in some circles, a term of denigration to describe writing online). At the end of the day, a reverse chronological presentation of my writing doesn’t really suffice. I want to be able to highlight interesting things I’ve done, not simply the latest ones.
As I’ve written about before, I’ve started using GitHub to manage my various research and writing projects. GitHub Pages (plus, now Jekyll) make it very easy for me to create subdomains on Hack Education: research.hackeducation.com, writing.hackeducation.com, speaking.hackeducation.com, 2015trends.hackeducation.com, horizon.hackeducation.com, and so on. (Bonus: it’s super-simple to clone one project and make a new one with the same Hack Education “look.” Double bonus: there are no new MySQL databases or servers to manage when I launch a new project. There are no databases or servers to manage at all.)
Using GitHub in this way has helped me to compartmentalize my work in new ways and to think about how best to highlight what I do, to make my best work (not just my most recent writing) discoverable by readers. (See the new Hack Education landing page, for example.) Using GitHub is also an important part of working in the open – openly-licensed and in the public. My code is open. My data is open. My writing is open. Open and forkable.
Identity in the Open
Working in the open is an important part of my professional identity. At times, and increasingly as of late – particularly as a woman in tech – this has been incredibly challenging (in ways that have not always been recognized by others in open ed). The list of my upcoming speaking engagements, for example, is no longer front-and-center. I am increasingly conscientious about how much “personal” stuff I post online – location, photos, anecdotes. These days, I "blog" less.
“How do you present multiple facets of your identity on your site?” Frances asked. Me, I maintain one site for my ed-tech work and one for my personal blog, a division I hadn’t really considered much (at least recently) until I saw Frances’ question on Twitter and others’ responses. Why separate the two? Why maintain an irregularly updated personal blog – other than the glee at controlling one’s own name as a domain? What does it mean that, unlike many men in ed-tech, my professional writing is not posted onto the domain that shares my name? It’s hard to not see Hack Education as a deeply personal site. Or is it?
Is one of my sites viewed as more gendered because it has a woman’s name attached to the URL? Or are all my sites marked as such, by virtue of my authorship? What does this “markedness” mean for how my work is interpreted? What does it mean, more broadly (and I think this gets to the core of some of the issues Frances raises) for how we view “work” in ed-tech, in academia? How does this shape what we decide to present, as our professional or personality identity (identities) online? How and when do we get to be "personal"? When are we punished - professionally, socially - for personal revelations?
I (Guess I Don't) Build
I found Stephen Downes’ recent comments on my annual ed-tech series to be fairly revealing to this end:
“There’s a certain cynicism informing this list, which I think is unavoidable if you stay in the business of covering the field long enough. This, I think, is where my role is different: I not only cover the field, but I’m deeply engaged in building as well, which allows me to take hope in something, even if it’s only my own efforts.”
I’m always fascinated to see how my work in ed-tech is deemed “emotional” or dismissed as merely “cultural analysis” – gendered descriptions of what I do (subtly, overtly) perhaps. I don’t know if cynicism counts as “emotional,” but I'm sure I'll hear explanations of why or why not. Men will explain cyncisim to me.
More interestingly in Downes' summary of my ed-tech trends series (which I have to interject here involves a lot of hard work; it's not a "list". Am I defensive? Emotional? How conventient...): the implication that I only “cover the field,” and I don’t “build."
It's something I hadn’t really thought about as specifically gendered until, again, I considered this question Frances raised of the performance and reading of online identity.
Men build the world; women complain about its shape.
I Don't "Make." I Critique.
Too simple a dismissal? Probably.
Turning back to what Deb Chachra wrote back in November, in how an emphasis on building and “making” dismisses all sorts of important work – intellectual, emotional (apologies for quoting at length):
I am not a maker. In a framing and value system that is about creating artifacts, specifically ones you can sell, I am a less valuable human. As an educator, the work I do is, at least superficially, the same year after year. That’s because all of the actual change is at the interface between me, my students, and the learning experiences I design for them. People have happily informed me that I am a maker because I use phrases like ‘design learning experiences’, which is mistaking what I do for what I’m actually trying to elicit and support. The appropriate metaphor for education, as Ursula Franklin has pointed out, is a garden, not the production line.
My graduate work in materials engineering was all about analysing and characterizing biological tissues, mostly looking at disease states and interventions and how they altered the mechanical properties of bone, including addressing a public health question for my doctoral research. My current education research is mostly about understanding the experiences of undergraduate engineering students so we can do a better job of helping them learn. I think of my brilliant and skilled colleagues in the social sciences, like Nancy Baym at Microsoft Research, who does interview after interview followed by months of qualitative analysis to understand groups of people better. None of these activities are about ‘making’.
I educate. I analyse. I characterize. I critique. Almost everything I do these days is about communicating with others. To characterize what I do as ‘making’ is either to mistake the methods—the editorials, the workshops, the courses, even the materials science zine I made—for the purpose. Or, worse, to describe what I do as ‘making’ other people, diminishing their own agency and role in sensemaking, as if their learning is something I impose on them.
In a recent newsletter, Dan Hon wrote, “But even when there’s this shift to Makers (and with all due deference to Getting Excited and Making Things), even when ”making things“ includes intangibles now like shipped-code, there’s still this stigma that feels like it attaches to those-who-don’t-make. Well, bullshit. I make stuff.” I understand this response, but I’m not going to call myself a maker. Instead, I call bullshit on the stigma, and the culture and values behind it that reward making above everything else. Instead of calling myself a maker, I’m proud to stand with the caregivers, the educators, those that analyse and characterize and critique, everyone who fixes things and all the other people who do valuable work with and for others, that doesn’t result in something you can put in a box and sell.
At first, I admit, I wanted to respond to Downes that I do build things. I’d point to my writing, websites, my GitHub repos, my open source code and content. I’m building analysis. I’m building criticism. I’m building a history of what’s lost and forgotten about education technology. I’m building repositories of data about ed-tech funding. I talk to educators, via social media, every day about all of this.
But in retrospect, perhaps he’s right: I’m not a builder. But it’s not because I’m a destroyer. (The opposite of “constructive criticism” is always this unspoken “destructive criticism,” isn’t it.) It’s because I’m doing something else entirely, unrecognizable I guess in a certain paradigm about "what counts" as professional work online, what counts as "building."
"A garden" but not "a production line."
I perform a different identity, a different role – online and offline – than a lot of the men who have become well-known for their ed-tech contributions. And that's okay. We need a multiplicity of voices.
I speak with passion and emotion. I acknowledge my subjectivity. I don't doubt men do too. But I'm marked. I'm always marked. My work is always personal even when professional.
That doesn’t necessarily make me inferior because I’m too emotional or too opinionated. But it sure makes me me. I am happy to be a caregiver and an educator that in Deb Chachra’s words “analyse(s) and characterize(s) and critique(s)"; I needn't justify my work in opposition to what those three verbs look like in schools, simply saying I imagine building a world of better "builders" on my own. I care about "us" not just "me." Not just people like me. And to be honest, I don’t know how to be or do anything else.
And this returns us to Frances’ question: what are the implications of performing all of this online? Because it tends to mean that my work (along with many others) is dismissed as "not quite right." Marked.
Marked: my son who hates school returning to school. Marked: my interest in food and beer and travel. Marked: my tattoos. Marked: my aging parents. Marked: learning to be a grownup, a writer, a thinker... in public, outside of formal schooling. Speaking up. Shutting up. Should I blog about these? Here? On Hack Education? Why or why not? What are the risks and what are the benefits if I do?
This is the great challenge for women in ed-tech who want to present "the professional" and "the personal" online simultaneously, whether we do that on one of our own sites or across many. Again, we're marked. We're always marked. Even if we see ourselves as building a different future for education, others view us as onlookers or instigators -- arms crossed and far too critical. Even if we carve "that stuff" off to another domain or subdomain, folks notice.
Men build, we're reminded. Women chatter. We complain. We criticize. We care too much but also too little. As such, ed-tech is men's world. They build. Women can talk and complain and write critical blog posts or make lists about it. But we women do little more than that. We don't really build.
Or. We do. We have always done. We build our own websites and communities. And from there, we tell a different story. We can tell it loudly. Mainstream stories and dominant narratives be damned. Expectations about what "blogging" looks like be damned. We can insist that what's deemed "frivolous" is actually central, what's deemed "craft" is art, what's dismissed as "not building" is actually the foundation of cultural production and reproduction. (Or we can skip the Marxist argument. I'm cool with that.)
Of course, how we build our sites matters. What we build. Form and content. I think we need to be thoughtful and deliberate as we do so. And we should keep identity (identities and their multiplicities) always at the forefront. How do we present them? How do we promote multiplicity in a world that still prefers one steady and self-confident male narrator voice? How do we narrate our personal and professional lives safely and boldly? I wish I had answers... mostly I just have my own voice, my own writing, marked but mine...