The Potential Pitfalls of Student Blogging (in Australia)
11 01 2006Adrian Miles has some interesting reflections on the absolute worst-case scenario that could occur when excessive spam and mandatory student blogging meet …
At the moment spam is the biggest problem facing blogs in education:
1. Unnecessary network traffic. You want your IT support to host blogs? Imagine 1000 student blogs, public, comments on (and trackbacks). Email sent each time a new comment for approval or trackback. On my own blog that would generate around 100 emails a day. Times 1000, that’s 100,000 largely unnecessary emails a day for a small student population of blogs. (Which is why things like Spam Karma are life savers.)
2. Student is required to blog. Student blog gets inappropriate spam, let’s say an explicit link to child pornography. Student is on holidays and because they clicked the wrong button last time they posted, (because they didn’t want to get lots of email on holidays) has actually let comments go through unmoderated. Such a link is illegal in Australian law (and most other jurisdications). Student is prosecuted, I am prosecuted, university is too.
3. Student then sues me, and the University, since now they can’t a) be a teacher, b) a police person, c) travel to quite a few countries but the blog was a requirement of their course. This is not an argument against blogs in universities, but it is a very clear description of why it needs to be done carefully and properly (and that’s just the spam problem).
Sure, it’s a pessimistic scenario, but not impossible. Something worth thinking about… (and thinking about how to address these sort of issues that arise from legal perspectives, too, not just reacting to the status quo).
Tama – Hi! Why not have your students publish their blogs on a commercial server? You could have them use the FREE Blogger.com and Blogspot.com services.
– Burks
Unfortunately, to get around the “who owns my blog content” question, a Creative Commons license is often used … and even on blogspot, that makes the content our responsibility. This is, after all, a worst-case scenario (and I would probably just ask students not to let unmoderated comments through if that’s the only answer we can find).
Of course, having enough flexibility in the law to place blame on spammers rather than their victims would be a better answer!
That worst-case scenario has happened. The question also need to be asked if someone teaches/uses blog, they should have been aware of the issues around spam, but hindsight is a wonderful thing.