Online Careers Work: Colonist or Inhabitant?

Abstract

The focus here is on what professional educators, which includes career workers, do on the net. There are metaphors for how people use the Internet, notably a spectrum ranging from natives to visitors. The so-called natives habitually use it, to the point where they can be said to inhabit the net. Visitors use it on an as-and-when basis, often as a secondary rather than primary source. The distinction accords with the question posed here. If the students and clients of career workers use the net as if indigenous to it, should we wonder whether educators use it as if colonists—seeking to direct its activity and resources from faraway and for their own purposes? More than that, suppose career workers were to think about joining the inhabitants, living alongside them as hosts, like neighbors? Distinctive and challenging conclusions are drawn about that in the chapter.

Colonizing the net would mean looking for ways in which the new-found Internet frontier can be adapted to what we were doing before it was discovered. The evidence would be the establishment of careers-work sites, into which careers work and other educators export what is familiar to them—using their language to get across their ideas about what they think worthwhile. Inhabiting the net would look to what the indigenous does and for ways of becoming a useful part of their lives. The evidence would be that those educators were being led by inhabitants into the pathways that they already navigate. It would locate career workers as partners to people who know the territory. In this chapter, both possibilities are examined. The expectation is that not much career-worker behavior occurs at the extremes. Instead in the chapter, there is a search for the kind of flexibility that online life increasingly requires. Colonialists have invariably been overtaken by history.

But career workers do not come to the partnership empty-handed. The chapter looks for what they most fruitfully bring to using the Internet for managing working life. The conclusions are that career workers should not try to create their own online colonies; they should instead work with students and clients on how what is found online becomes useful in life. It means seeing how online self relates to embodied identity, how online connectedness links to wider realities, and how online searching becomes reliable learning.

The analysis raises questions concerning what we mean by digital literacy. Literacy is seen here, not as an online facility with the tools but as an offline capacity for questioning what the tools find. It positions educators as doing what they do best: enabling questioning. This is not exporting content; it is expanding process. In this thinking, the Internet becomes a resource for critical use by partners. Online websites provide the content, and technology is the tool. But it is critical thinking that provides the process. There is warning here: by exploiting what the net can do for careers work, we risk losing what educators do best for students.