I think the first step in establishing my credible online identity as a teacher is to evaluate my facebook page, and likely make a new one. I made facebook when it first came out and used it often like many from my generation, but I fell off of it quickly. In fact I haven’t been on facebook in the past three years, but that doesn’t mean the people I’ve labeled as friends haven’t. My email is regularly bombarded with posts and topics related to me I’m not aware exist and as such I need to lock down my facebook, likely remove some offenders who I know live questionable lifestyles. The best plan of action is likely to simply make a new facebook for my teacher persona and use it for educational purposes in the classroom.
The next step is likely to develop a twitter, like our esteemed Professor Rish, and use it for good. In this case to help students if they ask questions and develop professional relationships with peers to establish myself in the community and be receptive to new ideas and help. This I believe will be invaluable, particularly in my first year of teaching to get the wisdom of veterans on the fly by tweet. Although I will have to get over my unreasonable disgust of twitter and instant messaging in general, that shouldn’t be too hard I believe.
Finally is to try and put myself in a position to become a credible scholar by reading articles and perhaps writing papers. I’m not the biggest fan of research papers but there isn’t a quicker way to put yourself out there in the academic field than with a research paper. Finding a topic would be difficult I imagine and getting everything squared away with the other aspects of research would be daunting and I may not want to particularly do it, but sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to in life. Something I need to condition myself for before I can tell future students that.
ENGL 3241 KSU 