Emerging Identities in Virtual Exchange

There has been considerable talk about the future of research and practice in education. Occasionally the discourse tends to the euphoric, sometimes it strays more to the dystopic. Public debates often explore how educators can and should meet society's demands in the globalised, interconnected geopolitical situations of today. Voiced concern about learners (as future 'global,' 'digitalised' citizens) regarding what skills and competencies they must have and what knowledge they are constructing (or not), both formally and informally, are prevalent in frequent public debates. However, no matter where one stands on the issues of debate, there is a general consensus that education will be transformed in the next decades in order to accommodate the rapid technological, socio political, geographical, and environmental changes the world is experiencing, not to mention the many changes on the human level that people live on a daily basis. This book explores how identities emerge and are negotiated by young people in online facilitated dialogue, a form of virtual exchange. It offers a framework for this type of exploration based on the assumption that both the situated context and the technologies mediating online interactions influence, but do not necessarily determine, the interactions taking place and the participants' identity orientations. Identity is viewed not as fixed and static, but rather multiple and fluid as interactants position themselves in relation to one another. This framework is then applied to the analysis of one specific virtual exchange context, and the interactions over several weeks of a group of participants from a wide range of backgrounds.