This post was originally posted on my other blog, but I thought people who read this one might also find it interesting…

The first activity in #clmooc is to create an un-introduction – or really a re-introduction – that is to introduce yourself in a different way. A way that involves making and remixing.

At the moment, introductions are one of the hardest things I do. I have no clue even where to start …

Hello, my name is … 

Hello, I’m Rebecca Hogue …

Hello, I’m Becky …

The name says something about me. You see, I use Rebecca professionally. I use Becky with my close friends, my church community, and the breast cancer community. When I attended the et4online conference, I discovered that what people called me became a cue – If they called me Becky, I knew that they knew my breast cancer story. If they called me Rebecca, then likely not. An interesting side note, I found it very uncomfortable being called Becky by my healthcare team. It took me a while to realize that I saw that as a patient safety issue.

I’m … 

a writer

a blogger

a PhD student

a part-time professor

an instructional designer

an education technologist

an eBook producer

a researcher

a breast cancer warrior

a breast cancer survivor

an ePatient

….

And the list goes on. I’m not one thing. I’m many thing. And yet in some ways I’m none of them. I’ve been trying to figure out how to introduce myself, and have yet to find something that really works.

On vacation last week, I decided I wanted to focus more on writing. I wanted to identify not just as a blogger, but also as a writer. That I wanted to really focus on writing one of the several books I keep talking about writing. And so, when the lone gentleman in the next campsite came over to visit around our campfire, I introduced myself as a writer. His first question was What have you written? Would I know it? What genre do your write? This outlines one of the challenges when you are trying to figure out who you are, and who you want to be. The minute you try to be that person, you need to be able to be that person!

This has become a real challenge with the Google Hangouts that Maha and I do as part of our Virtually Connecting project. You see, she starts off with “Hi, I’m Maha Bali. I’m a professor of practice at the American University in Cairo, Egypt”. When I haven’t come up with anything wittier, I usually respond with “I’m Rebecca Hogue from sunny Santa Clara California”. You’ll note that I don’t actually say what I do. I do, however, talk about the weather a lot. That is the Canadian in me. Canadians are obsessed with the weather. In this part of California, conversations about the weather get kinda boring pretty quickly.

Anyways, I thought I’d finish this off with a little clip of me introducing myself over the last two years. It begins as me back in January 2012, January 2014, February 2015, April 2015, and finally ends in May 2015.