Last month, I
officially made the move to work from home. I travel a decent amount with work,
but the majority of the time, most of what I do is done in front of computer,
with a pair of headphones and a mic on, multiple screens open – one usually to a
live feed of a meeting, and my iPad propped up with 10 or 15 books open on
various tabs. So when there was some shuffling of campuses, and because I had
been working remotely for a few months, it was an easy transition to have me
work from home. We locked in the VPN, got a soft line for my phone needs, and I
was up and running in time for the 11:00 AM meeting. Barring a few Skype for
Business calls dropping, it’s been smooth. I sometimes wonder if people can
hear my pugs snoring when I’m on a call, but I just pretend that adds to the
charm.
There’s only one thing
that hasn’t been as smooth, and it, luckily, has nothing to do with work. It’s
the room. I can’t seem to get the space the way I want it. My desk faces a huge
window that catches the most beautiful morning light, but the other things in
the room just aren’t working together. Something is off, and I can’t figure out
how to fix it yet. Although it doesn’t impact my work, when I walk away, I’m
constantly thinking about how to rearrange the bookshelf and the cabinet and everything
else. I’m trying to create a space with a specific identity, but I don’t know
exactly what kind of identity I need it to have yet.
About a week ago a
friend of mine posted a ridiculous, terribly written article that was nothing
short of an attack on higher education. The article had an obvious political bias
and blamed universities for being too sensitive to students, faulting educators for, well, pretty much everything. Somewhere in the title, and throughout
the piece, the author criticized the phrase “safe spaces,” saying that this need
for safe spaces is “what’s wrong with this country.” I can listen to almost any argument and empathize,
but there was no evidence and no logical support. I don’t know why I read it, but it
continues to bother me. Probably because I’d argue that creating safe spaces for students
to explore and make mistakes is exactly what college is about. Students, in a
lot of ways, form parts of their identities when they are in college, so having
a safe space is a key aspect of that growth.
In fact, just today I
was working with a faculty member who teaches a class on multicultural social work, and she stated
several times that she wants the students to feel safe enough to know they can
say the wrong thing. She’s creating this wonderful introductory exercise that
asks students to reflect on how cultures perceive disabilities, and without
that “safe space,” she knows we'd be doing a great disservice to those students.
*****
Considering the
physical space of my room and the created safe space for the students led me to
think about our class and the way spaces and identities overlap in the physical
world just as they do in the digital world. Over the past almost two weeks, we’ve
all been exploring and creating digital spaces and each space, although unique,
contains pieces of ourselves that transcend the various platforms. In the
analytics class, one of the most powerful realizations came to me early on when
we read about physical monitoring devices (like Fitbit) and how they are,
essentially, our data doubles – these simulacrums of ourselves.*
With that in mind, and
considering this week’s discussion of PLNs and communities, I started thinking
about how we all fit into digital spaces and how we craft identities that best
conform to whatever role we hope to have. Even if we keep our actual identities
anonymous, within just a few interactions, we can already see traits and
characteristics forming with each tweet or blog. We don’t know each other, yet
I could get pretty close to guessing who wrote which new blog based on voice,
topic choice, tone… all the things that make up our identities.* And that is
incredible to me.
In a way, all of these spaces are connected and revolve around this idea of creating identities.
Whether we are trying to figure out why a bookcase seems out of place, why a friend
posted an article, or why a student wouldn’t feel comfortable answering a
question, there is something very personal and very deliberate
about our spaces, and that doesn’t seem to change if they are for our eyes or the
eyes of everyone in our network.
Inspired by:
*Dennen, V. P.
(2009). Constructing academic alter-egos: Identity issues in a blog-based
community. Identity in the Information Society, 2 (1), 23-38. doi: 10.1007/s12394-009-0020-8
*Ruckenstein,
M. (2014). Visualized and interacted life: Personal analytics and engagements
with data doubles. Societies, 4, 68-84. doi:10.3390/soc4010068
and
David
Bowie’s "Space Oddity," which can be made loosely appropriate for most
situations.
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