Real Life Person or Avatars?

What is better a real life picture or an avatar for your online life? I feel that there is nothing wrong with having an avatar for your online life. Many people feel that as an adult you should have a real picture of yourself so people know that you are real and they can see what you look like. I am not sure that I agree. So much of some of our lives are online from Facebook to Twitter to Skype to Blogs/Wikis; I am not sure I really want my picture out there! I have my real picture on Facebook, but use an avatar for Skype and Twitter.

What do you think? Do you think teachers/adults should use real pictures for all of their online profiles, or avatars? What do you use? Do you use something different for personal online profiles vs. professional profiles? I would be very interested in hearing opposing views on this matter.

For students, I think it is an ideal situation. You definitely don't want to post student pictures online, but an avatar that they create takes care of privacy issues for students.

I read the Advanced Activity for Week 4 on some different avatar creation tools. I really liked the Picassohead avatar creator. Here is my Picassohead:

 

This is the first time that I had seen or heard about Picassohead and it was a lot of fun to create this. One thing that I had a lot of trouble with was keeping my signature attached to my picture. I ended up copying and pasting into Paint and putting the signature on top of the picture. I could not find any other way of doing this.

I have another avatar that I created and use for Twitter and Skype. I created this in Gizmos (which has since changed to Digimi. Here is a picture of my other altar ego.

So, if you see either one, it is me!