This assignment is asking you to do three things:

  1. Identify an aspect of your identity that is an important part of who you think you are – and then think about a moment/event that was  important in helping you to characterise yourself to yourself and to others in this way
  2. Represent that moment or event using text, image and sound
  3. Present this as a webpage (or what we are referring to as a node)

If you are unclear what is meant by the term identity, consider the following:

“If identity provides us with the means of answering the question ‘who am I?’ it might appear to be about personality; the sort of person I am. That is only part of the story. Identity is different from personality in important respects. We may share personality traits with other people, but sharing an identity suggests some active engagement on our part. We choose to identify with a particular identity or group. Sometimes we have more choice than others. In considering identity we have to balance the relative importance of structures, the forces beyond our control which shape our identities, and agency, the degree of control which we ourselves can exert over who we are. Identity requires some awareness on our part. Personality describes qualities individuals may have, such as being outgoing or shy, internal characteristics, but identity requires some element of choice. For example, I may go to football matches on Saturdays because I enjoy shouting loudly with a crowd of lively extroverts, but I go to watch Richmond because I want to identify with that particular team, to wear that scarf and make a statement about who I am, and, of course, because I want to state that I support one AFL team and not the others. We may be characterised by having personality traits, but we have to identify with – that is, actively take up – an identity.” Taken and miodified from  Questions of identity http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=176757# If you are interested, you could read the entire document.

On the basis of this, I could list some aspects of my identity that are important to how I see myself. I can even characterise them according to the schema above of agency and structure.

Structural  aspects of my identity

Teacher / Mother / Woman / Australian-born / Melbournian / Sister

These are defined in some part by forces beyond my control – however, within these broad categories, there is a good degree of room for choice about the kind of teacher, the kind of mother, the kind of woman and so on. Or even further to that, there is a choice about whether to be a teacher or a mother. So these are inflected by agency – by my choices – to some extent as well.

Aspects of my identity over which I have agency

Richmond supporter / Lover of books / Writer / Musician / Someone who believes in cultural diversity / Gardener

We often like to characterise these aspects of ourselves as structural rather than something we choose – when we say things like “I was born to write” or “I was born to sing”. But clearly, even if we feel very strongly about an aspect of our identity such as this, there is still a degree of agency at work. And often, there is a moment or event or person which drives our identification with an aspect of our identity over which we have agency.

So let’s take one of the latter categories that I identify with – musician – and look at how that got to be there.

There are probably a number of events which led to my interest in singing but the person who most influenced me was my dad. A lovely tenor, Dad would sing in the car wherever we went. When I was really young, the old car that we had didn’t have a radio so Dad would teach us all of the songs that he grew up singing. Being with dad in the car was particularly important to me as my parents divorced when I was 4. So Dad and the car meant an outing – and singing was a really important part of that.

How would I represent that? Well, there’s one really strong memory I have of driving to the Nicholson River in Gippsland to go camping and fishing. The drive took about 5 hours and it was marked by various milestones along the way. There is no one way that I could represent this – but here is an attempt.

See  http://netlit.swinmc.net/example/020.html

I can now choose 5 elements at random to link to other nodes.

See http://netlit.swinmc.net/example/020_example2.html