I’ve been using Twitter and Facebook for years (but then again, apart from the odd friend who ‘Doesn’t own a TV’ or ‘Refuses to use Facebook’ – I’m assuming that this is the norm right?).

But after partaking in a number of educational conferences over the last couple of years (mainly ASCILITE – Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education) I’ve starting making more and more contacts; both colleagues who have similar roles to me in their institutions or people who share the same love of bands and music.

My social media presence was always that; social. Keeping up with the main events of relatives in the UK or just exchanging stupid remarks and organising events with friends from uni. My work life was always separate.

But now the lines are blurring. My professional life and my social life and becoming rather intertwined and I’m not really ready for it.  Not yet.

I’ve started following more and more #edtech people online and have gotten into the (good or bad?) habit of checking twitter while eating breakfast and emailing relevant/interesting links to myself at work to check later. Of course, this is usually 5-50 links a day and I don’t always get the time to look into them. But they’re always there. Waiting for me to fwd them on or add them to our scoop.it collection at work.

But I digress as this post was originally about the awkwardness of merging and forming my online ‘professional’ identity.So after the #ETMOOC conversationst his week I decided to create an about.me account. Got the app, uploaded a background and 10 minutes later (OK it was more like 30 minutes as I couldn’t decide on an appropriate background image that would effectively represent me and in the end just went with a shot from a trip to Iceland in 2008), it was live: http://about.me/jacquikelly

But now it’s all done.  I quite like it and I figured it was a nice compromise between having a LinkedIn account/online CV and having to accept friend requests from people I don’t really know.

Jacqui