I was just reading a colleague’s blog about her institution’s new policy to restrict the use of online spaces in courses to university servers. This is done to protect students, to protect "student privacy" from online surveillance and to protect students from inappropriate commerical appeals (as opposed to the appropriate commerical appeals to which students are subject every day on campus, in the classrooms and dormitories…appropriate apparently being defined as those who have paid the university for the opportunity to make those appeals).

There have been debates, on this blog and certainly elsewhere, about the status of the classroom as a public or private space. Obviously students are protected by FERPA from public comments by faculty related to their grade. However, the status of student work produced in a classroom is more nebulous. If the university can insist that students post their essays to Turnitin.com and allow that company to store a copy of it in their database (for their own commerical benefit), then it would seem that students are limited in the rights they can exercise over their work. There are numerous instances in which students’ work is made public: school newspapers and literary magazines, public readings, service learning projects, internships, academic conferences, bound theses in libraries, artwork displayed in campus shows, student theater performances, and so on. We hope our graduate students will publish. I hope my undergraduate students will publish their poetry and fiction.

Obviously these are different contexts from that of a publicly available course blog; my point however is that there is certainly no general objection in university life to making student work public. Indeed one might go further to say that a significant goal of higher education is to prepare students to enter into public discourses. Now certainly it may be the case that faculty might fairly judge that students in particular courses are not ready to enter public discourse. No one would argue that all college courses should contain an element of public discourse (well…maybe I would, but not today).

By the same token, I could also argue for the value for an element of more private discourse. Like many, I like to encourage my students to take risks in their writing. I wouldn’t want them to be publicly accountable for those risks. Public discourse is about a different sort of risk, one more carefully measured by the consequences. That said, as a student, I would not feel particularly comforted by the notion of the university having a file of all my online writing. Of course I’m thinking that the type of surveillance that worries me most is the official, government variety, the type I imagine universities complying with far more quickly than commerical entities whose profitability might rely upon their ability to protect their customers.

But let’s cut to the chase. Such moves are about a few simple things.

1. Institutional oversight: students complain to department chairs, parents call deans, and they say the professor had them doing x or y. The institution reacts because it realizes it doesn’t know what’s going on in these classrooms, that with the advent of web 2.0, courses are suddenly everywhere and anywhere but on campus. Academic freedom or not, institutions want control. The question is: how are you going to go about it?

2. Brand: another approach to the control issue. Universities want to control the "look and feel" of the educational experience. They will allow virtually any content that faculty curriculum committees will approve, but the institution manages the college experience. This is what the university markets to prospective students, the brand experience. Increasingly perhaps colleges are becoming savvy to the importance of regulating "off-brand" experiences in the classroom.

3. Capitalization: sure, your students may be using blogger or other websites for free, but obviously someone is making money somewhere. By having students go off-site for educational services, the university may imagine it is missing an opporunity to capitalize further on the college experience. Remember the objection here is not that students see advertisements while doing coursework. They see ads in virtually any classroom they enter. The objection is that the university isn’t being paid.

What I will be interested to see is if universities can create proprietary online communities that are useful and attractive to users. They have certainly failed to date, evidenced by the fact that faculty look off campus to teach their courses. The fundamental error in the design of university spaces as I have experienced them is that they place an incredible overarching priority on control and management. The faculty manage students and the institution manages faculty. Only I’m not interested in being managed and neither are my students. If my college came to me and said that if I wanted to use an online component I had to use Web CT and only Web CT, then I would probably not use online instruction at all.

When I would go with a concern to my now-retired department chair, he would sometimes ask me if this was a battlefield I was willing to die on. I would not pick this battlefield to die on. I wonder if it is the battlefield on which higher education wishes to die? I assure you that to seek this type of regulation, this type of university control, will prove to be a monumental blunder, but it may be one that higher ed cannot avoid, the evolutionary deadend down which these institutions have travelled. They may inescapably insist that learning is a private experience, that knowledge is proprietary, that authorship is individual, and that the academy is the arbiter of truth.

It would be far wiser to effect a public, academic discussion about public, online discourse and pedagogy. Undoubtedly, there are choices to be made here, practices that work better in certain contexts than others, ethical issues, questions of evaluation, and so on. Like other curricular decisions, these are best made by faculty–in a faculty senate, in committees, in departments and programs, and by individual faculty. This is also a conversation for scholarly investigation and debate.  Ultimately, the questions is not should we or shouldn’t we, but how, how will higher education adapt itself to emerging modes of communication and learning?