This past year, I took a sabbatical from July to December to focus on two major projects: a book and a course. The book, Digital Identity in the Age of Big Tech, will be published in fall 2025 by Routledge. It represents the culmination of my research and teaching on how we form our online (digital) identities over a lifetime. The book explores the intersection of our digital identity through social, political, consumer, medical, health, and financial lenses.
Each fall, I teach an undergraduate seminar course on digital identity, and I hope this book will serve as a textbook for that course as well as similar courses across the globe. Over the years I’ve found that much of the research and writing has focused on digital identity in relation to cybersecurity and hacking, with little attention to the social implications of a digital identity. In my course, students gain practical skills in marketing themselves online, and I hope readers of the book take away similar insights.
The exercise was interesting because much of what I cover is visual—analyzing actual screenshots of social interactions and posts across all types of media platforms. Securing copyright clearance has been challenging, especially when mentioning online disputes between celebrities and what falls within public domain. At the end of each chapter, a “Something to Think About” section presents real-world examples and challenges readers to reflect on how they might handle or interact with the issue(s).
At the start of 2024, I was invited by Dr. Ndubueze Mbah, a history professor at the University at Buffalo and Commissioner for Education in Enuga State, Nigeria, to serve as the Special Senior Advisor to the Governor of Enugu on education technology and digital literacy. I was asked to provide digital information literacy assessments for teachers to identify those most comfortable working in the new Enugu State Smart Green Schools. The teachers completed three weeks of synchronous and asynchronous training on digital pedagogy, digital tools, and information literacy.
In June, I traveled to Enugu with Dr. Mbah and Dr. Mara Huber of the Center for Africa Technology Transfer to train teachers in person on using VR and AI in teaching. I also worked with 40 school librarians who would become the first digital school librarians in the new Smart Green Schools.
The final Enugu project was installing an offline, digital library for use in the Smart Green Schools using an open-source tool called Kolibri. I’ve been using Kolibri for about five years with my African partners and this project allowed me to go further into implementing Kolibri across multiple schools using smartboards and tablets.
The moment it all “clicked”:
After returning home, I continued training the librarians online for another three weeks. After graduation, they were conditionally hired to work in the new schools as they come online. Enugu currently has 13 completed Smart Green Schools, with 243 more planned by the end of 2025.
In the fall of 2024, Dr. Mbah asked me to create a four-hour workshop for all 26,000 schoolteachers in Enugu on the basics of computing. The goal was to prepare teachers with the basic computer skills necessary to complete the online Competency Based Test (CBT) for promotion and equip them to work in a Smart Green School. I designed a workshop with videos and assignments that was delivered locally, across 3 ICT centers in Enugu over three weekends. Local trainers used the curriculum as an outline, weaving in their own tools and examples during the hands-on assignment portions.
Digital media librarians with Cynthia after training.
As a result of this work, I was invited to the official presidential commissioning of 10 new K-12 schools on Jan. 4. I had the honor of hosting the president in one of the preschool classrooms, where the offline digital library was running on the smartboard as he was introduced to the governor’s bold initiative to create technology-rich and innovation-focused public schools for all children in Enugu State.
My future plans include a return to Nigeria to work with five schools in Lagos who wish to have digital information literacy training for their teachers, and to develop offline, digital libraries to support their school curriculum.
Here is the interview we gave two days later.