Online Pedagogy and Student Privacy

I find myself strongly affected by Josh Honn’s blog post this morning, and would encourage you all to read it. (He’s also on Twitter if you want to say hi: @joshhonn.) I set up this course with a default expectation of public engagement–and not just with your final digital thesis projects, but along the way, too, with a publicly-accessible/Google-indexed eportfolio, with biographies and other student-generated content on this site, with our digital reading journals, with Google Docs of my lesson plans that I know other scholars are having a look at as we progress (not in the least because I posted links on Twitter, and interacted with the authors we are reading in that fashion).

We should probably have a brief discussion on Tuesday about privacy, and what guidelines this class should have going forward. I think that public engagement is a critical part of research and scholarship, and I think that too much of what happens in the academy is classist and kept separate, so my default is visibility, visibility, and more visibility. But I may have accidentally trampled on your own thoughts and feelings about that as students. So in the meantime, let’s keep doing our work as planned–but let’s also check in at our next meeting, and make some decisions as a group.