Simon Grant of CETIS

My book, “Electronic Portfolios: Personal information, personal development and personal values” has recently been published, and is eventually available on Amazon etc.

The publishers have it in their catalogue.

I was very surprised by the high list price, which I have had no influence over. I would publish it for no more than half that price. Perhaps the publishers aren’t expecting all that many sales? But I hope that doesn’t stop people ordering it for their libraries. It is relevant to many different people, and the principles should be valid for a few years, so I’d say it’s worth having in any library where there are educators using e-portfolios, or developers developing them.

Social software is good for learning if, and only if, the society of learners is, or can be persuaded to be, positive towards learning. But what if you’re a teenager in a peer group in which learning is uncool? Perhaps we need software that expressly excludes the peer group?

I was at a meeting in Birkbeck, London, November 18th, called “Workshop on Personalised Technologies for Lifelong Learning”, which included outcomes (I missed) from the MyPlan project - generally to do with e-portfolio systems, lifelong learning, etc. In the general discussion, “Next Generation Environments for Lifelong Learning”, it was Andrew Ravenscroft (who manages the fascinating InterLoc) who came out with the phrase “antisocial software”, but I thought is was so apt, even though a bit extreme, that it needs popularising.

There’s enough of a serious point there to be well worth thinking about carefully. The general assumption that social software is a potential positive force for learning (among those keen on social software) needs challenging, not because is isn’t often true, but because it isn’t true always. Rather, you have to start by thinking about what the social group norms and values are. It has been said that in some school environments, achievement is a serious handicap to social success in the peer group. Surely, in these environments, it is not a good idea to use social software for learning, in the sense of doing learning in a group which involves all the peer group by default.

Instead, learning ideally needs to be done out of the view of the peer group, or in a setting where the peer group social norms and values do not apply. One way of doing this for traditional classroom learning is to introduce strong behaviour rules that are very different from behaviour outside the classroom. This approach would be the one proposed by various “old school” teachers, and there are books which I remember from teacher training days where these approaches are promulgated. Another way of doing this, which could also now be thought of as traditional, is through a more personalised approach, where learners work on their own worksheets. But for e-learning in these environments, what is needed is to separate the learning experience from the social group, not link it.

Of course, learning software that works that way would not really be “antisocial”, and this for two reasons. Firstly, one could have social software with varying degrees of privacy. Learners could use the more openly social facilities with the peer group, and private ones with teachers. Indeed, learners actually interested in learning might benefit from support in their interactions in the peer group. Secondly, social software with these capabilities could help learners find those other minority individuals who also want to learn, and smaller groups could be formed, outside the view of the majority.

A wider point relates to other things of interest to me, particularly about the multiplicity of personality. Teenagers in particular have different “personas”, or whatever you want to call this phenomenon of behaving in different ways in different contexts, and being embarrassed if behaviour displaying the values from one context slips through into the other. E-portfolio tools, as I will be describing in my book, could be used to help young learners to recognise the differences between the different contexts they find themselves in, and to adapt their personality differently in those different contexts.

To end with a much wider-reaching question, could we use anti-social software, not only in schools, to subvert social norms which do not value learning, but also perhaps as an aid to subversion in an organisation where the peer culture has turned against really effective work, or a country being ruled by a force which is fundamentally against democratic and accountable government?

Catching up on blog entries this morning I notice one from Joanna Bawa reproducing one from Andrew Hinton which refers to Alan Cooper’s “The Origin of Personas“. Now particularly because I have been closely associated with the usability and HCI community, I need to take account of how that community uses words. The Andrew Hinton piece clearly implies a usage of the term ‘persona’ to mean some kind of representative fictional character, stereotype or archetype who might use some software, or perhaps be engaged in a wider process - some character thought about and designed for. At the bottom of the article there are some links to other very interesting writings on the topic. People have come in and grabbed the term ‘persona’, uncompromisingly. Time to escape. Oh woe - the “intolerable wrestle with words and meanings”!

And I see why, as well. A ‘persona’, being originally a mask, can be worn by more than one person. It can be seen more like a role. The depersonalized persona?

In contrast, what I have been trying to get at in previous writings (other posts here and here) has been something much more intensely personal. It is the set of typical behaviours of a particular individual in a particular context or setting, along with their values in that setting, their attitudes, their propensities. It’s so close to the idea of identity that I was calling them identities for a while, before I admitted that the term ‘identity’ was too firmly entrenched in the realm of those who write software to check that only those allowed somewhere can get in.

Then this January came a new book, “Multiplicity”, from Rita Carter, which simply uses the term ‘personality’, indeed, making a virtue of the connection with multiple personality disorders. You could class it as popular psychology if you like, but in any case I think it is very worthwhile. Of all the people who have discussed matters in this area, Rita Carter is the one who comes closest to identifying just what it is that I regard as so important. The main thing that she does not go into as much as I would have liked is personal values, which to me are very clearly a function of the personality (in her multiplicitous sense), not the individual.

Addendum: Carter suggests this as a short definition of personality: “a coherent and characteristic way of seeing, thinking, feeling, and behaving.”

The most recent paper I have written much of, presented in the Medev event in Newcastle recently, does talk about professional identity, and fleetingly uses the term persona, but dwells more on what is really personal. Is it time to move on, led by Rita Carter, and switch term from ‘persona’ to ‘personality’?

Back on 26th July I wrote about this issue. I was at the time sticking out for using the term “identity” to refer to that complex of personal qualities and attributes associated with particular contexts, groups of people, roles, etc., and having strong implications for personal values.

I’ve recently changed my mind, and reflected that in my LEAP 2.0 work. (Translators of) Jung used the term “persona”, just like Nicole Harris. I had some problems with that. One of them is that “persona” is too close to the very frequently used term “person”. But what about the term “personality”?

Personality has plenty of common language meaning. Comparing the relevant Wikipedia entries for identity and personality, I’d say that personality as a term has a lot going for it. Though I wouldn’t want to base terminology on pathology, “multiple personality disorder” does seem to display the right kind of exaggeration of what I’m trying to get at, while the terms “multiple identity” and “multiple personality” seem to be used together quite often in the same context.

Development is a very important concept for me. “Identity development” seems to be used in a sense which implies one identity per human being (leaving aside the pathologies above). “Personality development” lives less with psychology and more with life coaching - not very far, I suspect, from the “personal development” that is better known to us.

But I like the greater scope for plurality in “personality development”. It sounds, to me, more like something that can be put on at will. It leaves nicely open the options, firstly to accept or cultivate several personalities suited to different situations, and secondly to work towards an integrated personality. The very fact that people talk and write about “well-integrated personality” or “fully integrated personality” implies that one can have something that is not fully integrated. If it is not integrated, there must be disparate parts.

I also particularly like the connection with personality inventories and such like. Whereas the assumption seems to be that we have just one “personality”, I think this is an idealisation. More likely, one’s responses to several personality inventory questions would be affected by the situation of the test, or the situation in which one is asked to imagine oneself when taking such a test.