Tama’s eLearning Blog

In a comment on yesterday’s post, Burks Oakley, the Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Illinois, pointed out that in his latest podcast produced for his Burks on Learning blog, he did something of a showcase or review of my iGeneration course, focusing on its use of blogs and podcasting. I was extremely flattered on behalf of the course members by the kind words from Burks (and I stress on behalf of the course, since it was the students who brought the vast majority of energy, creativity and critical skill to the course, while I was more like a human signpost to some nifty articles I’ve read!). In his podcast, Burks does raise one important issue which I’ve given a bit more thought to and would like to comment on. From his transcript, Burks says:

One last thought about the iGeneration course, and its emphasis on student posting to such a public environment as a blog. When I shared the iGeneration blog with a few of my colleagues last week, Lanny Arvan, from the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois, was very concerned that individual students were identified with this course. In an e-mail note, he wrote: [quote] I think here in Urbana some would find the approach in conflict with FERPA and, beyond identifying the students as a member of the particular class to the rest of the world, there is the issue that Google is the keeper of the content on Blogger.com. One can solve the second issue by having the campus run the blog service, but then there is less of a savings over the CMS. And one can solve both by giving students the ability to post inside the CMS or on the blog, with an opt in for the latter.
[unquote] Lanny is worried that Google is amassing a huge amount of information about individuals and their habits, by people creating blogs on blogger.com and having Google host the blogs on blogspot.com. Maybe he has a point – but until I see differently, I’m going to keep on creating my blogs with Blogger.com and publishing them on Blogspot.com. However, I also note that my colleague, Michael Cheney, who is podcasting for his online class at the University of Illinois at Springfield, also advanced our discussion of the iGeneration blog when he wrote in an e-mail note [quote]
And a follow up concern, for those who do not know Google saves every email message sent through gmail — even if you delete the mail message. The argument is that they use the info for their advertising profiles and content profiles…but at some point privacy issues will become an issue. [unquote]

I completely agree with Lanny Arvan that privacy is one of the biggest possible stumbling blocks in using a public blog as part of a university course. In the case of my iGeneration course, I generally encouraged students to stick with first-names only (after a careful review, I did discover one place where I had accidentally left their full names - which I’ve not corrected).

We used the iLecture/Lectopia system to deliver and store podcasts and since that system has only just been podcast-enabled, following general use, we went with listing full names listed in the “speaker” field because the speaker is generally the lecturer/presenter who is quite happy to be associated with the course they’re lecturing (or, of course, that course, like many, may not be available to the public, only to those enroled in the course). However, the issue of names does become more pressing when students are podcasting - do they want their full names assocaited for future evidence or as part of an ePortfolio (or something similar) or prefer not to have that mp3 file associated with them via google (or any other search engine/portal) for the rest of their lives? In the case of using the iLectures, we can simply set precedent by only listing first names except where students express a desire to list their full names.

(Incidentally, as part of their podcast assignments, students had to get Release Forms signed by anyone, including themselves, who appears in the podcast. These forms explicitly give permission for their voices to appear online, and to be archived or re-used in the future.)

In a broader ethical sense, it’s a tough question. Generally, I’d answer it by asking students to discuss the issue in class. What do they want? (Of course, that depends of knowing you want to ask the question in advance!). In situations like the iGeneration course, I’d prefer to think students can decide themselves - if they want to have their full name associated with their online material from the course, they can sign their assessment, podcast shownotes (and metadata), and seminar readings with their full name; if they’d prefer privacy, they can just use their first name.

As part of a portfolio of their work (or eportfolio), podcasts can be very useful, so students will probably want to take credit. That said, only one of the five podcasters has signed with her full name. However, to keep their options open, since students have access to the course blog, I’m intending to leave that access open indefinitely - they can remove full names at a later time if they desire. Conversely, if they later decide they want to take explicit credit they can add their full names - and since only they (or the course controller if they’re they’re the blog administrator) can change the blog post/shownotes, that leaves the student in charge. That said, it’s probably better to only have first names in the metadata for podcasts as a rule (or if it’s in any way unclear what sutdents want) because changing metadata on a large file can often be a quite painful process.

They’re just some brief thoughts, but I do agree the issue is important. However, from the position of life-long learning, I do think helping students develop their own voice — including their voice online — is an important part of education, and learning to use your full name, and be responsible and accountable for everything you write can certainly assist in encouraging critical self-awareness in students! (And while it’s part of a much longer post another day, the software architecture of the bigs CMSes like WebCT and Blackboard is generally inward-looking, and not really conducive to establishing a public voice, something I’ve written on before).

As to whether Google owns the content of the blogs, the blog content was explicitly placed under a Creative Commons License which is generally thought to legally protect the content of the blogs and allow students and the university to retain whatever ownership that license stipulates. (Creative Commons licenses, incidentally, are a brilliant way to get students talking about the ethics of plaigiarism - they tend to take it more seriously when the discussion begins with their rights to protect or share their content, not someone elses!). Reading over the annoying vague Google Privacy Policy and the additional Blogger elements, I gather that even if they’re amassing huge amounts of data, they can’t do anything with it that explicitly identifies the author without gaining further permission (I think - it’s not really my area of expertise - further comments on this are most welcome!). While I’m sure there’s more to think about regarding public student blogs and podcasts, I think that’ll do for a start! Please post your thoughts!

Links: [Burks' Podcast - 14Mb, Mp3] [Burks' Podcast Transcript] [Burks on Learning Blog]