Public and Private Course Blogs

November 27, 2005

2–3 minutes

There’s been some discussion of this issue on Blogs discussion list. Generally speaking, I think the sentiment is to encourage public blogs. I am not entirely sure what a "private" blog would mean. On Typepad, private means they do not list your blog in their recently updated list. However, it doesn’t mean that a blog is password-protected or anything like that. I suppose one could create a password-protected blog, but what would be the point? One might as well use WebCT or some other CMS.

Some have raised the issue of FERPA (the federal law that, among other things, establishes a degree of confidentiality between faculty and students). Because of FERPA, a professor cannot discuss a student’s grades or work with a parent (without written permission from the student) and cannot leave graded material in a public place (e.g. outside an office door) for a student to pick up. However, FERPA doesn’t protect students from making in-class presentations or sharing their writing in a workshop or participating in an online discussion in Web CT. It would protect them from having such work graded publicly, but sharing work in public is not prohibited by FERPA (which would make the law fairly idiotic, wouldn’t it?)

More interesting is the issue of copyright. A student’s post to a blog or WebCT is copyright protected. I would presume that the student retains all rights to whatever they publish. However, if I have a blog that I pay for and I require my students to post there, who owns the posts when the course ends? I assume they do, but I assume I have the right to delete messages. Ultimately the issue is a minor one as there is little commerical interest involved.

In any case, I am in agreement with the majority on the list. For me, the educational value of blogging, particularly for aspiring professional writers, is its status as public writing. One of the primary purposes of writing is to engage in a conversation with the world. Even if few read it, imagining an audience has a significant effect on writing…or at least it should!

I’ve had students blogging for a couple years now. Blogging collectively on a course website and blogging individually on free sites like Blogger. Their Blogger sites can be fairly anonymous and usually I allow them to write on whatever they want as long as they post regularly. The purpose is simply for them to have the experience of blogging like the rest of us. On the course website they are identified by name and so there is more accountability.

I suppose a student might complain about sharing their work online. I have had colleagues who were reluctant to put their syllabi online out of fear someone would steal their work. I’ve had students who didn’t want to workshop their drafts because they suspected their peers might take their ideas. These are isolated cases, but I would tell them the same thing. The purpose of writing is to produce and communicate knowledge. Yes, there is a risk of theft and other risks as well, other consequences and judgments (see my recent post on academic blogging). That’s part of the deal. That’s what makes rhetoric interesting and important.

Writing has consequences.

4 responses to “Public and Private Course Blogs”

John

November 28, 2005 at 12:32 pm

Based on what you’re writing above, I can see why we’re on separate sides on this issue. A truly private blog is no different than the traditional paper journal that only the student author and, maybe, the instructor see. That’s not what this discussion has been about.
The issue, as discussed on the list, wasn’t really public blogging vs. private blogging, but rather whether or not the default setting on a course management system should be for public access (i.e., open to non-class members) and closed access (i.e., open to those involved with the course). In this context, the blogging is always public; the question is how public. And, again, it’s not an argument over whether or not access to online course environments should be restricted or not, but what the default setting should be.
While I did raise some FERPA issues and intellectual property issues (this isn’t about who owns copyright, but the issue of student control over their intellectual property. As far as FERPA is concerned, we need to ask what constitutes a student record. At my institution, at least the last time I was involved in a discussion of this issue, private student records included what classes a student was currently enrolled in. And this isn’t as silly an issue as it may sound. Imagine, for a moment, a battered person hiding from their abuser. If an abuser has access to what classes a student is enrolled in, that abuser knows where to find that student. Making student work available to the public Web does run the risk, however slight that risk might be, of putting such a student at risk. We can argue that there are a number of workarounds, and there are. But, either way, there are issues of student privacy that we need to consider when requiring students to make their work available to the public Web.
Likewise, the issue of intellectual property that I raised should not be brushed off so lightly. If we’re going to argue that the Web is a real publication medium that should be taken seriously, then we need to treat Web published work in that way. Requiring students to publish to the Web means dictating to students what happens to their intellectual property. In effect, this requirement deprives them of the right to control what happens to their own work. That isn’t a minor issue and it has nothing to do with commercial interests.
Please note that neither the privacy nor the intellectual property issues I raise here students should not be required to share their work with members of the class. That is a reasonable expectation. And, likewise, I am not arguing that student work should not be made public to the outside world, just that there are a number of issues that need to be concerned when doing so.
And that was my main reason for arguing the default that the setting be set for restricted access. Requiring students to make their work public beyond the confines of the classroom should be a decision that is consciously entered into. Instructors who choose to do this, who accept the ethical, practical, and pedagogical responsibilities that come with such a decision, can choose to change the default to unrestricted access.
My concern is that by setting the default to unrestricted access, we run the risk of placing both instructors and students into situations they may not have prepared for. Consider again the issue of control of students’ intellectual property. You and your institution may decide that, based on the specifics of your local contexts, the pedagogical value outweighs the intellectual property issue. I can think of a number of instances in which this would be the case. But making that decision should be a conscious decision, not one that is unconsciously entered into because of the default setting in a course management system.
I realize that many dismiss these concerns as buying into the current hype surrounding media coverage of blogs. For me, it’s not. My concerns are rooted in actual classroom experience, both my own and those of others. Earlier this year, I shared my own personal experience of a student being tracked down by a stalker based on pseudonymous online posting done in my class (her only Web presence) even with my conscious efforts to mitigate such issues, and Sharon Cogdill has an excellent essay in The Online Writing Classroom.
While Cogdill’s essay “Indiscipline: Obscenity and Vandalism in Cyberclassrooms” is an account of an extreme case, it does illustrate a number of issues instructors need to be conscious of when asking students to make their work public. (And Cogdill’s essay is even about an in-class online discussion, not one open to the wider public, which amplifies the seriousness of these issues.)
While I agree with you that the value of educational blogging is its public nature, the question is again how public the writing should be and what the pedagogical goal is. It seems that you’re considering blogging from the context of aspiring writers, and I would agree, having them put their writing out for the world outside the classroom is valuable.
There are other kinds of academic blogging, however. I most often use blogs in the classroom as a dialogic journal in which students share thoughts and ideas and a variety of writing to learn activities. I want this work to be public within the context of the class, as opposed to the traditional private journal.
While I want this work to be public (in the sense available to the whole class), I also ask my students to take risks that they often would not take if they knew the world outside the classroom could scrutinize their work. I could get around this by having them blog pseudonymously, but, again, pseudonymous blogging is never really pseudonymous. One’s identity can be outted or discovered any number of ways. That issues aside, however, I believe it’s pedagogically valuable for students to take full responsibility for their words and thoughts, and, therefore, we don’t use pseudonyms.
To date, on the list nor elsewhere there hasn’t been any kind of response to my main concern, that instructors should not open their classrooms to the world unconsciously and uncritically, and that bothers me. I’m not suggesting that you should have addressed this concern here or elsewhere, I’m just suggesting that the issue is much more complex than has been represented.
So, again, the issue for me is not one of public vs. private blogging but what the default setting should be on a Drupal release designed specifically to function as a course management system. By setting the default to unrestricted access, we would push instructors and their students into situations they may not have thought through, and those situations do have real pedagogical, practical, and ethical concerns that should not be entered into without conscious thought.
Personally, I’ve encouraged may instructors to open up their classrooms to the larger world and I have done so with my own classes, but I also stress that when we do so, we take on a new set of ethical, practical, and pedagogical responsibilities that we need to be conscious of before we make that leap.
Sorry this is such a long comment, but this is a complex issue and we clearly walked away from the list discussion with very different understandings of what was being discussed.

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Alex

November 30, 2005 at 6:20 pm

John, thanks for your thoughtful response. I appreciate your concerns and your careful consideration of this issue. I certainly wouldn’t argue that blogs should only be public. My original comments were something of a tangent to what was discussed on the listserve rather than a direct continuation of that conversation.
No doubt there are consequences and risks involved in making a course blog public. There are also ideological and pedagogical consequences to keeping the classroom a private or exclusive space. There is a underlying issue here, one which I think interests us both, about the implications of the notions of public and private discourses. If our objective is to prepare students to engage in public discourse, either in a professional or more general, democratic, cultural context, then they must learn to write in a public forum. I would suggest that writing in a private context can only prepare students so far for writing publicly.
Writing is a risk. I know this sounds flippant, but I mean it honestly. It is not a risk to be taken lightly or unnecessarily. Some teachers might advocate for making the classroom into a “safe” space. However, in my view, risk is an integral part of learning. That doesn’t mean that we should endorse recklessness.
Clearly no one would want their course to become the means by which a student is victimized. And we do need to realize the Internet is not always a friendly place. There are all kinds of risks. If I ask students to attend a play or a poetry reading or we take a three-hour drive to go on a retreat and the roads get icy or my assignment has students working late in a deserted computer lab, something could happen. I don’t mean to downplay the dangers of the online world, but posting to a blog is not necessarily the riskiest thing we ask students to do.
I agree that we need to recognize the value of risk. I think you and I agree that it is a matter of balance, but that we are perhaps looking at this balancing act from opposite ends.
I also appreciate your comment about students’ intellectual property. There is no doubt that I am asking my students to expend intellectual capital in their pursuit of a degree. There are plenty of choices here. They choose to attend a college, join a major, and enroll in a course. The course requires them to post to a course blog and even create their own independent blog. They can drop the course if they want. They can choose what intellectual property they want to expend, but they do have to spend it.
After all, the purpose of having intellectual property is that you are able to exchange it for material benefit.
The university already places limits on students’ intellectual property. A student cannot submit the same work twice without permission from both professors. That would seem to indicate that some rights are surrendered even in an exchange solely between teacher and student. A student cannot sell his/her intellectual property to another student.
The same would be true of anything they posted on a course blog. Their writing remains their property. They can do what they want with it (within the limits set by the university). True, posting to a blog does make it possible for someone to steal their intellectual property. It also makes it possible for someone to see how brilliant they are. Risk.

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John

December 1, 2005 at 1:41 pm

Alex,
As I hope is clear from what I’ve written above, I do agree with what you state here, even on the intellectual property issue. My concern is, and always has been about entering into this issue consciously or unconsciously, about the ideology imposed by a default setting. Obviously, I’m arguing for the conservative choice when it comes to the default, but that in no way means that I advocate or believe the ideology of the conservative choice is inherently better or correct.
Thanks for the thought provoking discussion.

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Alex

December 2, 2005 at 12:49 pm

Thanks John, you’ve given me something to think about on this issue. I’ll be looking to see more from you about it in the future.

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Alex Reid, professor of digital rhetoric, Media & Artificial Intelligence