Abstract
<p>This paper outlines a preliminary study of the kinds of strategies that master students draw upon for interpreting and enacting their identities in online learning environments. Based primarily on the seminal works of Goffman (1959) and Foucault (1988), the Web of Identity Model (Koole, 2009; Koole and Parchoma, 2012) is used as an underlying theoretical framework for this research study. The WoI model suggests that there are five major categories of “dramaturgical” strategies: technical, political, structural, cultural, and personal-agential. In the data collection, five online master of education students participated in semi-structured, online interviews. Phenomenography guided the data collection and analysis resulting in an outcome space for each strategy of the WoI model. The study results indicate that online learners actively employ a variety of strategies in interpreting and enacting their identities. The outcome spaces provide insights into ways in which online learners can manage their identity performances and strategies for ontological re-alignment (reconceptualization of oneself). Further study has the potential to elucidate how learning designers and online instructors might facilitate such identity-work in order to shape productive online environments.</p>
Highlights
Learners today navigate through physical and virtual environments with apparent ease
The main questions the author seeks to answer in this study include: How do learners experience each Web of Identity (WoI) strategy? Do learners adjust these strategies to attain cognitive resonance? An additional underlying goal is to ascertain the value of the theoretical model: does the WoI provide a lens through which researchers can gain deeper understanding of how learners shape and reshape their online identities?
Phenomenography appears commensurate with the investigation of WoI actions from the point of view that phenomenographers regard experience as a result of interaction between the individual experiencing and the phenomenon experienced (Åkerlind, 2005); in the WoI model, identity develops from the interaction between the individual experiencing strategies and their expression of strategies in response
Summary
Learners today navigate through physical and virtual environments with apparent ease. These environments offer a variety of social networking opportunities through which participants can accumulate, exchange, create, and integrate new information into their personal narratives. The researcher draws upon her previous work on the Web of Identity (WoI) model (Koole, 2009) which outlines strategic techniques for interpreting and enacting identities. The goal of this phenomenographic-style study is to explore the extent to which these strategies are experienced in a given online learning community, and how strategy enactment contributes to the development of self and affiliation. It is intended that the outcome of this short study will form a basis upon which to structure a larger study of identity positioning and relational dialogue in online learning
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