Our Digital Futures

It was really great to meet some of the students from the Performance Design and Practice (PDP) course at Central Saint Martins who are helping us kick off the Online Identities Pilot Programme 2013/14.

We started the session by discussing and sharing our perceptions of Online Identities project, and there was a strong feeling around the table that the area of web making/development is very important to professional practice development and needs more support, so this project was very welcome.

We went through some of the details of the project and we continued an informal conversation, which we all really enjoyed and agreed that we should include ‘informal chats’ in future planning of the programme and maybe at the end of each session.

Some Feedback:

We all liked the idea of trying to create a support and sharing network, online and offline UAL community of practice for web makers, and that this could grow and continue beyond their BA and into their time as professional practitioners. We will all try and contribute to the POI group on process.arts and share with others.

Most said they had some sort of web presence, mostly Facebook; this was also identified as the case in this survey and impact study. One example discussed was about having a ‘ready made’ site and the issues of maintaining this, full of junk code, limited editing powers, no plugin options or many dynamic upgrade options and also sudden unexpected raise in fees, e.g. it started cheep to attract you in and then cost rise once your embedded in their product.

Most students at this session had twitter accounts some had more than one, students also saw LinkedIn as being too corporate and as having lots of spam and strange encounters, they could not see it being useful to them at this point.  

We questioned the issues, pros and cons of building your online professional Identity in Facebook or on proprietary software/3rd party ‘ready made’ web providers (Read more about this here). Again there was a general agreement that there was a real need to learn more about how to make the right decisions in choosing your web home e.g.

• Manage/understand cost
• Be more independent, build your own site, on a basic server, be able to move to new servers without losing web content and communities.
• Understand backend development (web servers, files, transfer protocols etc.)
• Understand security issues/implications
• Dealing with Spam, Scams, unwanted strangers endorsing you or being an unwanted online 'friend' (Trolls). 
• Look at alternatives to Facebook communities (move away from these being the primary/only communities but more secondary)
• Issues with YouTube and other social media with: adverts, marketing etc. (what are the non-proprietary alternatives?)
• Being searchable e.g. how to improve your visibility online
• Employers searching you, what do they look for?
• Importance of LinkedIn (Employees will check you out, you don’t need to spend long on this platform but having an up-to-date digital CV could help)
• Make best use of social channels, Facebook, twitter etc. (as secondary always pointing back to you online home)
• Names and identity brand copyright, how do you know what you use is ok?
• URL extensions, which ones? .com .org .co.uk .biz and how much they cost

Looking forward to our next session with Simon King, Introduction to web development,  Tuesday 12th November 5pm to 7pm, C303 CSM.