I’m Professor Martin Weller. I’ve written a lot about online identity in my blog, The Ed Techie over the years. My own online identity is very much shaped by that blog and was shaped for many years by my use of Twitter.

The use of blogs, social media and other online technologies, such as the creation and sharing of YouTube videos and podcasts, can allow educators to create an identity beyond their classroom or the lecture hall. This is part of a practice known as open scholarship, which involves being open about knowledge creation and dissemination.

Veletsianos (2012), writing about Twitter, identifies seven ways in which scholars use social media:

• to share information, resources, and media
• to share information about teaching
• to request assistance from and respond to requests from others
• to engage in social commentary; to engage in digital identity and impression management
• to explicitly network and connect with others
• to highlight their participation in other networks, for example linking to blogs.

Online education creates new opportunities and considerations for educators, for example they can share practice and ideas using a blog. Dennen (2010) points out that at the start of a blog, the academic must make decisions about that online identity: what type of tone will the blog adopt? What topics will it cover? How much of the author’s personal life should they reveal? She suggests that, just as on campus there exists a set of social norms, so it is online, and the blogger responds to these. These identity norms spread across the highly connected blogosphere ‘based on a viral movement of individual actions across blogs’.

These new identities can also be in conflict with traditional ones, as Costa (2013) argues, stating ‘Higher Education Institutions are more likely to encourage conventional forms of publication than innovative approaches to research communication’. She goes on to suggest that although universities are not necessarily opposed to change, their own identity is deeply associated with certain traditions, which are reinforced through the creation of certain myths and ‘strategies that coerce individuals to play by the rules’. Blogging, and other forms of online identity, have their own social norms, which could be seen as competing with the traditional ones.

Relatively few educators, though, have the time and energy to maintain a blog. For many, their online identity is more closely associated with social media. For over a decade, Twitter/X was the main platform used by English-speaking academics and by multiple educator communities.

Twitter has been central in UK HE in the sense that it has been seen as the single most important gathering place on social media for academics. Individual academics have tended to see Twitter as the default place to have their social media presence (Carrigan, 2023).

However, this changed in 2022, when Twitter was taken over by Elon Musk, who made a series of largely unpopular changes to the platform:

including cutting down on content moderation; ditching its ‘blue-check’ verification system in favour of one that grants paying members additional clout and privileges; charging money for access to data for research; limiting the number of tweets users can see; and abruptly changing the platform’s name and familiar logo to simply ‘X’ (Valero, 2023).

These changes led to many academics and educators leaving the platform and/or opening accounts on other platforms including Mastodon, LinkedIn, Instagram, Threads and BlueSky (Valero, 2023). It also prompted many to think more carefully about what they wanted from a social media platform – was the aim to engage with a wider public, to form a specialist community, to share ideas, to source new ideas, to reach out to experts, or to be acknowledged for your own expertise?

Moving forward, there has been a shift away from the assumption that all online educators will be creating an identity on the same platform. Your choices will be shaped by what you want to achieve, the communities you want to engage with, and your local context.

This week, you’ll look at different aspects of online identity, including the importance of the online educator’s role in supporting student wellbeing.

© The Open University