Jobs Conferring Digital Identity

Digital identity is an educational pickup that is particularly associated with jobs that require the use of digital skills where self learning on the job can be associated with the increased blurring between a worker’s online presence and their offline identity, which presents them as a ‘landscape of views’.

For young people, an online/offline identity is:
an extension of themselves
a way to explore different parts of themselves
a way to share or explore interests that are not available offline.

In general, it can provide:
a sense of belonging and community
access to support from like-minded individuals
an appreciation of different perspectives
reduced isolation
a discussion environment.

Blogs recently have become a popular way of collecting information and learning experiences related to formal education. Public objects tagged with information can be accessed by learners to view connected blog parts, comment on posts by others (peer feedback), or create new blog entries with mobile authoring appliances. They are simple, but powerful software tools for integrating formal and informal learning, supporting long-term informal learning on the job and communicating a deep place group’s or individual’s achievements and ideas. Furthermore, blogs offer all categories of learners a great degree of autonomy to structure information while also embedding reflection in a peer community. Moreover, the interaction of learners with community-constructed web-posted content can be used to facilitate formal and informal learning in a single community of practice as a social adaptation to a local cultural ecology of CLICs. A community of practice is a group of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. The concept was first proposed by cognitive anthropologist Jean Lave and educational theorist Etienne Wenger in their 1991 book Situated Learning.