Dear colleagues,

This coming Wednesday, we are delighted to have Helen Beetham with us for the next #LTHEchat to discuss Digital Wellbeing.

Helen Beetham is a writer, researcher and adviser on e-learning issues. She worked on the 2010 Beyond Current Horizons programme, commissioned by the UK government, and has written key national reports on e-portfolios, e-learning and pedagogy, digital literacy and open educational practice. A long-standing consultant to the Jisc e-learning programme, she recently completed a year-long study on the expectations and experiences of today’s ‘digital students’ and is now working on a national framework for staff digital capabilities. Her co-authored volumes Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age and Rethinking Learning for a Digital Age (both Routledge) are standard texts on masters courses in Education.
Tweets: @helenbeetham.
Blogs: digitalstudent/jiscinvolve.org and digitalcapability.jiscinvolve.org.

Helen says: “The technologies we choose and refuse, the digital spaces we inhabit, and our use of digital media all touch deeply on who we are as a person. The term ‘digital identity’ is used to mean how we present ourselves in digital spaces through our profiles, connections, shared media and communications. It is a positive expression of who we are and how we want to be known. My interviews with staff and students in UK HE, however, suggest that even the most digitally proficient find some aspects of digital participation to be stressful, troubling, or detrimental. Staff tend to talk about workload, information overload and work-life balance. Students are more concerned about distraction, exposure, and the loss of face-to-face contact. Both worry about data, how aspects of our selves are construed by digital systems, and by changes in how we relate to one another – including in learning and teaching. This crosses with more conventional concerns about e-safety and cyberbullying – the need to respect others and to behave ethically online. The term ‘digital wellbeing’ is now (proposed to be) included with digital ‘identity’ in the new Jisc framework for digital capability as a way of framing some of these issues. Of course there are forces at work which individuals can’t address, particularly when it comes to inequalities of access and power in digital spaces, or the systemic impacts of the digital revolution on the economy, society and wider environment. But an awareness of these issues and their potential impact can be considered an element of individual capability, and an important means to thrive in a complex digital world. This LTHE chat will introduce six key questions for digital wellbeing. Further reading can be found here: http://digitalcapability.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2015/06/11/revisiting-digital-capability-for-2015/”

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See you Wednesday, same time, same place 😉 – 8-9PM GMT #LTHEchat

The LTHEchat team