Eyefood

A thought occurred to me earlier on, regarding the way we have created accounts for the students in the pilot on The Site. To make things simple, I rehashed a version of my ‘click to join the site’ box (which is the glowing orange doughnut in some of the snapshots that have been appearing), so that all they had to do was click and they’d automagically have a new account and be put into the right groups.

Which is all very well, but I’ve started wondering how this will work in relation to their existing accounts - will having two identities on the site be confusing? Will they flip backwards and forwards between the two? Will they spend more time devoted to one than the other?

I know that personally, having several identities online is something that I’ve struggled somewhat with for the past six years. Juggling which particular ‘persona’ I felt like on a particular day hasn’t always been easy - even though I’ve taken steps like having multiple browser installations (with their own separate cookies) to be able to do things like keeping three Flickr accounts and three Twitter accounts going at the same time.

Even then though, I’ve always noted that I seemed to shift emphasis from one persona to another depending on a host of different things.

…

Originally, when I was first playing around with the idea of having specific Second Life sections of the site, I introduced a category in the user database to store Second Life names. One thing that I think this pilot will show, is whether I should have pursued that idea, rather than relying on separate accounts.

We’ll see I guess