Constructing the Self in a Digital World

It has become popular in recent years to talk about “identity” as an aspect of engagement with technology – in virtual environments, in games, in social media, and in our increasingly digital world. But what do we mean by identity, and how do our theories and assumptions about identity affect the kinds of questions we ask about its relationship to technology and learning? Constructing the Self in a Digital World takes up this question explicitly, bringing together authors working from different models of identity but all examining the role of technology in the learning and lives of children and youth.

Cynthia Carter Ching is Associate Professor of Learning and Mind Sciences at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on how people across the lifespan and within particular sociohistorical contexts make meaning with and about the technologies in their lives. In 2007 she won the American Educational Research Association's Division C Jan Hawkins Early Career Award for Humanistic Research and Scholarship in Learning Technologies for her study of digital photo journals in early childhood education. She has also served as an Associate Editor at The Journal of the Learning Sciences. Her work has appeared in Teachers College Record, Urban Education, The Journal of the Learning Sciences, Computers and Education, Early Education and Development, and E-learning and Digital Media. She has previously worked at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and received her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Brian Foley is Associate Professor of Secondary Education at California State University, Northridge. His research focuses on the use of the Internet to support learning communities for students and teachers and the use of visualization in science education. This work includes studying communities of teachers as well as students. He explores how students in informal online environments such as Whyville.net create and define their community. Working with science teachers, Foley helped develop the Computer Supported Collaborative Science program, a model of teaching that takes advantage of cloud computing to enable a more collaborative science classroom. Foley completed his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley and has worked at the Caltech Precollege Science Initiative and the University of California, Irvine.