I’ve been contacted of late by a few teachers trying to work through the security and privacy issues that go along with the use of Weblogs in the classroom, so I thought I’d take a little time to go over how we handle it and to pose some of the other questions that we still struggle with.
First, let me say that these issues are ones that we’ve spent a lot of time discussing and debating. The last thing that we want, obviously, is to put our students at risk as they work more transparently and publish to a wider audience. Even though (knock wood) we’ve not had one problem in the hundreds of student Weblogs that we have created here, parents are legitimately concerned about the potential abuses.
So, we do a few things up front. Our Acceptable Use Policy asks parents to approve the publication of student work to the Internet. If for some reason that approval is missing, teachers send home another form, and to date we’ve not had any students who didn’t eventually get permission. We also encourage our teachers to communicate with parents about what Weblogs are and how and why they are using them. Usually when teachers tell parents that the Weblog can be used to keep them more in touch with what their children are doing and what’s happening in class, they like the idea.
When students use their Weblogs, we limit identification to first name only. Even though we need an e-mail address to set up the account, we either use bogus e-mails or rely on a feature in Manila (the software we use) to hide the address when it is legitimate. We talk to kids about what to do if they are contacted by “strangers,” that they should never give out personal information or start on line conversations with those not vetted by the teacher. In addition, teachers are asked to subscribe to the feeds of their student Weblogs which include any comments that might be left. While some are more vigilant than others, I do think most teachers are able to monitor activity on the sites to a satisfactory degree. Finally, both the teacher and I are “managing editors” of the student sites, so if things break or if there is abuse, we can deal with it in short order.
For some classes like Creative Writing, where students are writing about more personal issues, we close the entire site to the public. Manila has an “Editor’s Only” function that permits use of the site only by those students that the teacher allows. Or in other cases, where we want the content to be seen but the interactivity to be limited, we will have students become members of each other’s sites thus allowing them the ability to comment before closing the site to outside membership. (In one configuration of Manila, membership is a requirement for posting feedback.)
Still, it would be nice if we were able to “approve” comments before they were posted. (That would make me sleep much better at night, believe me.) And I would love it if Manila gave the option of having some posts only viewable by members of the site while having others that anyone can see. It would make the drafting process more effective, I think.
Bottom line is that there is a fair amount of setup and a lot of vigilance that has to go into this process. But once it’s set up, and once everyone understands the whys and hows, I think we do a pretty good job of finding a balance between transparency and privacy.
Now, having said that, I’m not as well versed on the capabilities of the other blogging packages out there. If you use Blogger or MT or something else and would be willing to post about your privacy process, I’m sure it would add much to this discussion.
We’re on MT, like you know (http://cyberportfolio.st-joseph.qc.ca). The first year of our experimentation of blogging have produce lots of opportunity (more than 3 500 post and 5 000 comments on our 140 blogs named “cyberportfolio”) to realise that private spaces were more secure but were “low level of enthusiasm” to because of the lack of audience. At the beginning we proceeded like you, Will, with the form and the speech to our student. The “code de déontologie” I wrote was pretty usefull to manage the limits of what we tolerate or not (http://cyberportfolio.st-joseph.qc.ca/mario/archives/002423.html). Most of our attention, with the time, goes to the large amount of comments we had from the community outside of the school. With MT, we have a “posteriori control”. We did account on the students and their parents to report undesirable comments but it work so so… The “Opossum team” managed a RSS feed for each post (comments are received in our agregator) of our set of MT blogs (http://www.opossum.ca/archives/000192.html) and since this time, me and teachers can follow each comments made in appropriate delay (and feedback or censure) what give more satisfaction to us and parental confidence in our system. After a year, I can say that this issue (security) is not the main we discussed with our community but remain the first one with other collegues I try to “blogvangelised”… New parents talk to them who are beginning their second year and we still on the edge with any problem occur (god blessed young “quebecbloggers”); but the great results we have in learning (motivation, writing and reading competency) is so encouraging that we have some space to manage if someone try to test our management… Next step : a “Mini-Colloque” (http://wiki.st-joseph.qc.ca/MiniColloque) hold in my school with other edubloggers to try to figure what we can do with the tool to improve this issue (and others)… One in another, we think to a kind of a “pop-pop” window who would ask to people commented that the quality of what they wrote should be high level if they want that their comment still published. We think to the quality of the writing to because sometimes, we are more preoccupied by the language than the security on the comments we have !
I do take the occasion to say BRAVO ! for your last contribution in Boston… I keep the pace to follow your great work. It would be so nice to participate to a conference with you… We will start it by a collaboration on a paper (Stephen’one, if I am wright) next september… It’s a beginning !